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XIV

Colonel Irving Morrell hadn't read the Iliad since he got out of the Military Academy, almost thirty years ago now. Chunks of it still stuck in his mind, though. He didn't remember the anger of Achilles so much as the Greek hero sulking in his tent after he'd quarreled with Agamemnon.

All things considered, Morrell would rather have sulked in Achilles' tent than in Caldwell, Ohio, where he found himself ensconced for the moment. Caldwell was a town of fifteen hundred or two thousand people, a few miles west of Woodsfield. It was the county seat for Noble County, as a sign in front of the county courthouse declared. That made him feel sorry for the rest of the county.

Caldwell was a coal town. People had been mining coal there for more than sixty years, and it showed. The air was hazy with coal dust. When Morrell needed to hawk and spit, he spat black. There were no red brick buildings in Caldwell. There were no white frame houses, either. The brick buildings were murky brown, the frame houses gray. The people seemed as subdued as their landscape. A lot of them seemed covered in a thin film of coal dust, too.

All things considered, Caldwell would have made Irving Morrell gloomy even if he'd gone into the place cheery as a lark. Since he'd gone in sullen, he would have been satisfied to come away without hanging himself. Even that much sometimes seemed optimistic. Caldwell was where what would have been his grand attack against the base of the Confederate salient in Ohio had ingloriously petered out. Sabotage and Confederate Asskickers had brought his armor to a standstill.

That wasn't the worst of it, either. He'd thought it would be, but he'd been wrong. As he watched some of his precious barrels chained onto flatcars bound for the East Coast, his fury and frustration grew too large to hold in. He turned to Sergeant Michael Pound, who was always good for sympathy over imbecilities emanating from the War Department. "I'm being robbed, Sergeant," he said. "Robbed, I tell you, as sure as if they'd held a gun to my head and lifted my wallet."

"Yes, sir," Pound said. "If they're going to take your barrels, the least they could do would be to take you, too. Seems only fair."

"They don't want me anywhere near Philadelphia," Morrell said. "They want me to keep fighting here in Ohio. They've said so."

"They just don't want to give you anything to fight with," Sergeant Pound said. "They'll probably set you to making bricks without straw next."

"You mean they haven't?" Morrell said. "By God, I was doing that for years at Fort Leavenworth. We had the prototype for a modern barrel twenty years ago-had it and stuck it in a back room and forgot about it. Christ, Sergeant, you went back to the artillery when they closed down the Barrel Works."

"I'm glad you don't hold it against me, sir," Pound said.

"A man has to eat. There's nothing in the Bible or the Constitution against that," Morrell said. "If there were no barrels to work on-and there damn well weren't-you needed to be doing something."

"That was how I looked at it, too." Pound suddenly snapped his fingers. "I'll bet I know one of the reasons why they're taking your barrels away from you."

"More than I do," Morrell said sourly. "Tell me."

"They're the biggest bunch we can get our hands on this side of the Confederate salient," Pound said. "Everything west of here has to go the long way around, up through Canada-either that or on Great Lakes freighters that the enemy can bomb."

Morrell eyed him. "Normally, Sergeant, when I say somebody thinks like a General Staff officer, I don't mean it as a compliment. This time, I do. That makes much more sense than anything I've been able to think of." He paused. "How would you like me to recommend you for a commission? You have the brains to do well by it. You have more in the way of brains than four out of five officers I know, maybe more."

"Thank you very much, sir." Michael Pound smiled a crooked smile. "If it's all the same to you, though, I'll pass. I've seen what officers do. There's a lot more nonsense in it than there is when you've just got stripes on your sleeve. Gunner suits me fine. It's simple. It's clean. I know exactly what I have to do and how to do it-and I'm pretty damn good at it, too. My notion is, the Army needs a good gunner more than it needs an ordinary lieutenant, which is what I'd be."

"Oh, I wouldn't say that." Morrell's smile lifted only one corner of his mouth. "Whatever else you were, you'd be an extraordinary lieutenant. You talk back to me as a sergeant. If you got a gold bar on your shoulder, you'd probably talk back to the chief of the General Staff."

"Seeing how the war is going, wouldn't you say somebody ought to?" Pound sketched a salute and ambled off. He was blocky as a barrel himself-and solid as a barrel, too. And, when he went up against something he didn't like, he could also be as deadly as a barrel.

Morrell looked east. Then he looked west. Then he muttered something uncomplimentary about Jake Featherston's personal habits, something about which he was in no position to have firsthand knowledge. Sergeant Pound was altogether too likely to be right. The thrust up to Lake Erie was starting to hurt the USA. Morrell wondered what the exact problem was. Could they ship enough fuel or enough barrels on the rail lines north of the Great Lakes, but not both at once? Something like that, he supposed. Logistics had never been his favorite subject. No good officer could afford to ignore it, but he preferred fighting to brooding about rolling stock.

Of course, if not for rolling stock he'd still have had his barrels with him. They would have broken down one after another if they'd had to get to eastern West Virginia under their own power. Breakdowns kept almost as many of them out of action as enemy fire did. Morrell wished it were otherwise, but it wasn't. The weight of armor they carried stressed engines and suspensions to the point of no return, or sometimes past it.

Half a dozen barrels still in Caldwell had their engine decking off. Soldiers were attacking them with wrenches and pliers. Some, maybe even most, of them hadn't broken down. A barrel whose crew kept it in good running trim didn't fail as often as one whose crew neglected it.

Far off in the distance, artillery rumbled. Morrell cursed under his breath. He should have been up there punching, not stalled in this jerkwater town. And how could he ever hope to land any punches if they kept siphoning away his strength? He couldn't, but they'd blame him because he didn't.

The Constitution said U.S. soldiers weren't supposed to quarter themselves on civilians. Like most rules, that one sometimes got ignored when bullets started flying. Morrell didn't ignore it, though. He was perfectly happy in a tent or a sleeping bag or just rolled in a blanket-he liked the outdoors. That was a concept General Staff officers back in Philadelphia had trouble grasping.

He was glad he had a tent when it started to pour about eight that night. Rain bucketed down out of the sky. It wasn't a warm summer rain, either: not the kind you could go out in and enjoy. The nasty weather said the seasons were changing. It would turn everything but paved roads into soup, too. Morrell muttered to himself. Enough mud could bog down barrels. That would slow things here.

He did some more muttering a moment later. If it also rained like this in Virginia, it wouldn't do the building U.S. offensive any good. That wasn't his campaign, but he worried about it. He worried about it all the more because it wasn't his campaign. But all he could do was worry. The weather did as it pleased, not as he pleased.

He'd just stretched out on his cot when Confederate bombers came over Caldwell. The drumming rain drowned out the drone of their motors. The first he knew that they were around was a series of rending crashes off in the woods east of the little town. Frightened shouts came from nearby houses. Morrell almost laughed. Civilians got a lot more excited about bombing than soldiers did.

With those clouds overhead, the Confederates were bombing blind. Morrell didn't worry that they would actually hit Caldwell… until the bomb impacts started walking west from those first blasts. The lead bombers had missed their targets by a lot. But the ones behind them, trying to bomb from the same point as they had, released their bombs too soon, an error that grew as it went through the formation.

That sort of thing happened all the time. Here, though, it was bringing the bombs back toward where they should have fallen in the first place. Morrell had taken off his boots to get comfortable. He put them on again in a tearing hurry, not bothering to tie them. Then he bolted from his tent and ran for the closest shelter trench.

He splashed and squelched getting down into it. It filled rapidly with cursing crewmen from his remaining barrels. However much they cursed, they kept their heads down. A chunk of bomb could do as neat a job as a headsman's axe-but a messy one would leave you just as dead.

"Here they come," somebody said as bombs started falling inside Caldwell. The ground shook. Fragments hissed and screeched not nearly far enough overhead. As Morrell bent to tie those boots, he hoped the civilians had had the brains to go down into their basements.

One crash was especially loud, and followed by a flash of light. "Fuckin' lucky bastards," a soldier said. "If they didn't just blow a barrel to hell and gone, I'm a monkey's uncle." Ammunition cooking off inside the stricken machine proved him right.

Another, different-sounding, crash probably meant a bomb had come down on a house. Going to the basement wasn't likely to save the poor bastards who'd lived there. Morrell sighed a wet sigh. Nothing to be done about it-and it wasn't as if U.S. bombers weren't visiting the same kind of hell on Confederate civilians.

"Pay those stinking sons of bitches back for getting me all wet and muddy," a barrel man said. Civilian casualties worried him even less than Morrell. His own discomfort was another story.

The bombs stopped falling. Morrell stood up straight and looked out of the trench. The barrel that had taken a direct hit was still burning in spite of the rain. By that yellow, flickering light, Morrell saw that two or three houses had fallen in on themselves. They were trying to burn, too, but weren't having an easy time of it in the downpour.

"Come on," he said. "Let's see what we can do for the locals."

A civilian lay in the middle of one of the streets, suddenly and gruesomely dead. What had he been doing out there? Watching the bombs come down? Did he think it was sport? No one would ever know now.

Other people came staggering out of houses. Some of them were wounded. Some were simply in shock, and crying out their terror to whoever would listen, or maybe to the world at large. "My baby! My baby!" a woman shrieked. She was holding the baby, which was also shrieking.

A corpsman took the baby from her. After looking it over-carefully, because fragments could produce tiny but deadly wounds-he spoke in tones of purest New York City: "Lady, ain't nuttin' wrong wid dis kid but a wet diaper."

"But the poor thing is frightened half to death!" the woman said.

What the corpsman said after that was memorable, but had very little to do with medicine. The woman squawked indignantly. Irving Morrell filed away some of the choicer-the corpsman would have said chercer-phrases. When he found a moment, he'd aim them at Philadelphia.

When Scipio looked in his pay envelope, he thought the bookkeeper at the Huntsman's Lodge had made a mistake. That had happened before, two or three times. As far as he could tell, the bookkeeper always erred in the restaurant's favor. He took the envelope to Jerry Dover. "I hates to bother you, suh, but I's ten dollars light."

Dover shook his head. "Sorry, Xerxes, but you're not."

"What you mean?" For a second, Scipio thought the restaurant manager thought he'd pocketed the missing banknote before complaining. Then he realized something else was going on. "You mean it's one o' them-?"

"Contributions. That's right. Thought you might have seen the story in the Constitutionalist yesterday, or maybe heard about it on the wireless. It's on account of the bombing in the Terry."

"Lawd!" Scipio burst out. "One o' dem bombs almost kill me, an' now I gots to pay fo' it? Don't hardly seem fair." It seemed a lot worse than unfair, but saying even that much to a white man carried a certain risk.

Jerry Dover didn't get angry. He just shrugged. "If I don't short you and the rest of the colored help, my ass is in a sling," he said. If it came to a choice between saving his ass and the black men's, he'd choose his own. That wasn't a headline that would make the Augusta Constitutionalist.

Scipio sighed. Only too plainly, he wasn't going to get his ten dollars. He said, "Wish I seen de newspaper. Wish I heard de wireless. Wouldn't be such a surprise in dat case."

"How come you missed 'em?" Dover asked. "You're usually pretty well up on stuff." He didn't even add, for a nigger. Scipio had worked for him a long time now. He knew the colored man had a working brain.

"One o' them things," Scipio said with a shrug of his own. He'd missed buying a paper the day before. He hadn't listened to the wireless very much. He did wonder how he'd managed not to hear the newsboys shouting the headline and the waiters and cooks and dishwashers grousing about it. "Been livin' in my own little world, I reckon."

"Yeah, well, shit like that happens." Dover was willing to sound sympathetic as long as he didn't have to do anything about it.

Before Scipio could answer, a dishwasher came up to their boss. "Hey, Mr. Dover!" he said. "I got ten clams missin' outa my envelope here!"

"No, you don't, Ozymandias," the manager said, and went through the explanation again. Scipio knew a certain amount of relief that he hadn't been the only one not to get the word.

Ozymandias, a young man, didn't take it as well as Scipio had. He cussed and fumed till Scipio wondered whether Jerry Dover would fire him on the spot. Dover didn't. He just let the Negro run down and sent him out the door. Quite a few white men boasted about being good with niggers. Most of them were full of crap. Jerry Dover really was good with the help at the Huntsman's Lodge, though he didn't go around bragging about it.

Of course, Dover was good with people generally, whites as well as Negroes. We are people, dammit, Scipio thought. The Freedom Party had a different opinion.

Dover said, "You be careful on the way home, you hear? Don't want your missus and your young ones grieving on account of some bastard who's out prowling after curfew."

"I's always careful," Scipio said, and meant it. "But I thanks you fo' de thought."

He went out into the black, black night. Augusta had never been bombed, but remained blacked out. Scipio supposed that made sense. Better safe than sorry was a pretty good rule.

The weather was cooler and less muggy than it had been. As fall came on, the dreadful sticky heat of summer became only a memory. It wasn't cold enough to put all the mosquitoes to sleep for the winter, though. Scipio suspected he'd get home to his apartment with a new bite or two. He couldn't hear the mosquitoes buzzing any more unless they flew right past his ears. Those nasty whines had driven him crazy when he was younger. He didn't miss hearing them now-except that they would have warned him the flying pests were around.

An auto slid past, going hardly faster than Scipio was. Masking tape reduced its headlights to slits. They cast a pallid glow that reached about as far as a man could spit. At least the driver here didn't have the delusion he could do more than he really could. Accidents were up even though fewer motorcars were on the road. That meant one thing and one thing only: people were driving like a bunch of damn fools.

As usual, Scipio had no trouble telling when he got to the Terry, even though he could hardly see a hand in front of his face. As soon as the sidewalk started crumbling under his feet, he knew he'd come to the colored part of town.

He skirted the shortest way home, which took him past what had been the bus stop for war workers. It remained a sea of rubble. Repairs got done slowly in the Terry-when they got done at all. Some of the buildings white mobs had burned in the pogroms after the Freedom Party took over remained ruins after seven years.

He'd almost died then. Two different auto bombs had almost killed him. He'd lived through the bloody rise and even bloodier fall of the Congaree Socialist Republic. He'd outlived Anne Colleton, and he never would have bet anything on that. After what I've been through, maybe I'll go on forever, he thought.

A bat flittered past, not a foot in front of him. It was out of sight almost before he realized it had been there. He wondered if the war had brought hardship to bats. Without street lights to lure insects, wouldn't they have to work harder to get enough to eat? Strange to imagine that one man's decision in Richmond might affect little furry animals hundreds of miles away.

"Hold it right there!" The harsh, rasping voice came out of an alley not ten feet away. "Don't even breathe funny, or it'll be the last thing you ever do."

Scipio froze. Even as he did it, he wondered if it was the worst thing he could do, not the best. If he ran, he might lose himself in the darkness. Of course, if he ran, he might also give the owner of that voice the excuse to blast him to hamburger with a charge of buckshot. He'd made his choice. Now he had to see what came of it.

"All right, nigger. Suppose you tell me what the fuck you're doin' out after curfew."

He'd thought that was a white policeman there, not a black robber. He would have been more likely to run from a man of his own color. "Suh, I works at de Huntsman's Lodge," he answered. "Dey don't let me off till midnight. I goes home at all, I gots to go after curfew."

"Likely tell," the white man said. "Who's your boss, damn you? Make it snappy!"

"Jerry Dover, suh," Scipio said quickly. "Mebbe he still dere. I ain't left but fifteen minutes ago. He tell you who I is."

Footsteps crunching on gravel, thumping on cement. A dark, shadowy shape looming up in front of Scipio. The silhouette of the juice-squeezer hat the other man wore said he really was a policeman. He leaned forward to peer closely at Scipio. "Holy Jesus, you're in a goddamn penguin suit!"

"I gots to wear it," Scipio said wearily. "It's my uniform, like."

"Get the fuck outa here," the cop said. "Nobody's gonna be dumb enough to go plantin' bombs or nothin' in a lousy penguin suit."

"I thanks you kindly, suh," Scipio said. If the policeman had been in a nasty mood, he could have run him in for being out after curfew. Scipio thought Jerry Dover or the higher-ups at the restaurant would have made sure he didn't spend much time in jail, but any time in jail was too much.

"A penguin suit," the cop said one more time-another dime Scipio didn't have. "Shit, the boys at the station'll bust a gut when I tell 'em about this one."

With a resigned chuckle and a dip of his head to show he was a properly respectful-a properly servile-Negro, Scipio made his way deeper into the Terry. He peered carefully up and down every street and alley he came to before crossing it. How much good that would do, with so many inky shadows for robbers to hide in, he didn't know. But it was all he could do.

When he came to a couple of the places where he was most likely to find trouble-or it was most likely to find him-he wished he had that foul-mouthed policeman at his side. He shook his head, ashamed and embarrassed at wanting a white man's protection against his own people. Ashamed and embarrassed or not, though, he did. The Terry was a more dangerous place these days than it had been a few years before. Sharecroppers and farm workers forced from fields when tractors and harvesters took their jobs away had poured into Confederate cities, looking for whatever they could find. When they could find nothing else-which was all too often- they preyed on their fellow Negroes. And Reds sheltered here, too. They weren't above robbery (from the highest motives, of course) to keep their cause alive.

He got through the worst parts safely. His last bad moment was opening the fortified door to his building. If somebody came up while he was doing that… But nobody did. He quickly shut the door behind him, locked the lock, and used the dead bolt. Then he breathed a sigh of relief. Made it through another night, he thought.

As the fear dropped away, he realized how tired he was. The climb up the stairs to his flat felt as if he were going up a mountain. He'd had that happen before, too. He didn't know what he could do about it. If he didn't work at the Huntsman's Lodge, he'd be waiting tables somewhere else. And if he couldn't do it anywhere, what would he be doing then? Prowling the alleys, looking for someone unwary to knock over the head?

Scipio laughed, not that it was funny. He might make the Constitutionalist if he tried it. What would the headline be? Augusta's oldest strongarm man? Augusta's dumbest strongarm man? Oldest and dumbest? That would probably do the job.

He trudged down the hall and opened his front door. A light was burning inside. Blackout curtains made sure it didn't leak out. Here as in other colored districts throughout the CSA, blackout wardens and cops were likelier to shoot through lighted windows than to bother with a warning and a fine.

As usual, he got out of his tuxedo with nothing but relief. Putting on his nightshirt felt good, where even that much in the way of clothes had been a sore trial in the hot weather not long before. Bathsheba murmured sleepily when he lay down beside her. "How'd it go?" she asked.

"Not too bad," he answered automatically. But then he remembered that wasn't quite true. "Got my pay docked ten dollars, though." He couldn't hide that from his wife-better to let her know right away, then.

The news got her attention, no matter how sleepy she was. "Ten dollars!" she said. "What you do?"

"Didn't do nothin'. Everybody git docked," Scipio said. "De gummint fine de niggers here fo' de auto bombs."

"Ain't fair. Ain't right," Bathsheba said. "Gummint don't fine no ofays when they do somethin' bad."

"I ain't sayin' you wrong," Scipio replied. "But what kin we do 'bout it?" The answer to that for Negroes in the CSA had always been not much.

Jonathan Moss led his squadron of Wright fighters out over Lake Erie. They were looking for trouble. They would probably find it, too. Just in case they couldn't on their own, they had help. The wireless set sounded in Moss' earphones: "Red-27 leader, this is Mud Hen Base. Do you copy?"

"Go ahead, Mud Hen Base," Moss said. "I read you five by five." Mud Hen Base was the Y-ranging station back in Toledo. For reasons known only to God, the Toledo football team was called the Mud Hens. They didn't play in one of the top leagues, so maybe Confederate wireless men monitoring the conversation-and there were bound to be some-wouldn't figure out where the fellow on the other end of the circuit was for a while.

And maybe the stork brings babies and tucks them under cabbage leaves, too, Moss thought.

"We have bogies on the lake. Range about seventy, bearing oh-seven-five. I say again, range about seventy, bearing oh-seven-five."

"Roger that," Moss said, and repeated it back. "We'll have a look. Out." He checked a small map, then got on the circuit with the rest of the airplanes he led. After passing on what he'd got from the Y-ranging station, he added, "Sounds like they're somewhere out east of Point Pelee Island. Let's see if we can't catch 'em."

Point Pelee Island lay north of Sandusky. Before the Great War, it had belonged to the province of Ontario. It had been fortified to hell and gone, too; reducing it had cost most of a division. Technically, Moss supposed it still belonged to Ontario. That didn't matter now, though-it was under U.S. management.

When the island came into sight, he led the squadron north around it. Some of the U.S. antiaircraft down there opened up on the fighters anyway. "Knock it off, you stupid sons of bitches!" Moss shouted in the cockpit. The gunners, of course, paid no attention to him. They probably wouldn't have even if he'd been on the wireless with them-how could they be sure he wasn't a Confederate who could put on a Yankee accent?

U.S. guns had already shot at Moss quite often enough to last him several lifetimes. They hadn't hit him yet. He knew of pilots who weren't so lucky. He also knew of pilots who hadn't come home because their own side shot them down.

Nobody got hit here. Someone-Moss couldn't tell who-spoke in his earphones: "I'd like to go down there and strafe those assholes." That had occurred to him, too.

Once past the danger, he peered east. He also looked down to the surface of the lake every now and again. The Confederates would be out hunting freighters. With the rail lines and railroads through Ohio cut, the United States had to do what they could to move things back and forth between East and West. And the Confederates had to do what they could to try to stop the USA.

He hoped he'd find Mules buzzing along in search of ships to dive on. The CSA's Asskickers were formidable if you were underneath them. To a fighter pilot, they might have had shoot me down! painted on their gull wings. They couldn't run fast enough to get away, and they couldn't shoot back well enough to defend themselves.

"There they are-eleven o' clock!" The shout crackled with excitement.

Moss peered a little farther north than he'd been looking. He spotted the sun flashing off cockpit glass, too. "Well, let's go see what we've got," he said. "Stick with your wingmen, keep an eye on your buddies, and good hunting."

His own wingman these days was a stolid squarehead named Martin Rolvaag. He came on the circuit to say, "They don't look like Mules, sir."

"I was thinking the same thing," Moss answered. "Razorbacks, unless I miss my guess." The medium bombers couldn't outrun Wrights, either, but they carried more machine guns than Mules did, and had to be approached with caution. And… "They've got Hound Dogs escorting them."

"They've seen us," Rolvaag said.

Sure enough, the Confederate fighters peeled away from the Razorbacks and sped toward the U.S. airplanes. Their numbers more or less matched those he had. So did their performance. They were a little more nimble, while the Wrights climbed and dove a little better.

Moss didn't want to fight the Hound Dogs. He wanted to punish the Razorbacks. Knocking them out of the sky was the point of the exercise. They could sink the ships the United States had to have. Confederate fighters could shoot up ships, but couldn't send them to the bottom.

But if Moss wanted the Razorbacks, he had to go through the Hound Dogs. The C.S. fighter pilots understood what was what as well as their U.S. counterparts. They were there to make sure the bombers got through.

Elements-lead pilots and their wingmen-were supposed to hold together. So were flights-pairs of elements. And so were squadrons-four flights. In practice, damn near everything went to hell in combat. Lead pilots and wingmen did stick together when they could; you didn't want to be naked and alone out there. Past that, you did what you could and what you had to and worried about it later.

Head-on passes made you pucker. You and the other guy were zooming at each other at seven hundred miles an hour. That didn't leave much time to shoot. And if you both chose to climb or dive at the same instant… The sky was a big place, but not big enough to let two airplanes occupy the same small part of it at the same time.

The Hound Dog coming at Moss started shooting too soon. You couldn't hit the broad side of a barn from half a mile out. That told Moss he was flying against somebody without a whole lot of experience. Anybody who'd done this for a while knew you had to get in close to do damage. Moss waited till the Hound Dog-painted in blobs of brown and green not much different from those on his Wright 27-all but filled the windshield before thumbing the firing button.

He missed anyway. The Hound Dog roared past him and was gone. He swore, but his heart wasn't in it. "Watch my back, Marty," he called to his wingman. "Let's go after the bombers."

"Will do." Nothing fazed Rolvaag. That went a long way toward making him a good pilot all by itself. If he didn't quite have a duelist's reflexes and a duelist's arrogance… That went a long way toward making him a good pilot but not a great one.

His calm answer had to fight its way through the shouts-some wordless, others filled with extravagant obscenity-from the other pilots in the squadron. A flaming fighter tumbled toward the lake far below. Moss couldn't tell if it bore the eagle and crossed swords or the Confederate battle flag. Like the USA and the CSA, their fighter aircraft bore an alarming resemblance to each other.

Bombs rained down from the Razorbacks. The bombers had no target-all they'd kill were fish. But they were faster and less likely to go up in a fireball if they got rid of their ordnance. As soon as they'd done it, they streaked for the deck. In a dive, they were damn near as fast as a fighter.

Damn near, but not quite. Moss picked his target. Once he heeled over into a dive, he stopped worrying about the Hound Dogs. They couldn't catch him from behind. The dorsal and portside machine gunners on the Razorback opened up on him. He respected their tracers, but didn't particularly fear them. They had to aim those single guns by hand. Hits weren't easy.

He, on the other hand, needed only to point his Wright's nose at the Razorback's wing root. The bombers carried fuel in their wings. Confederate self-sealing gas tanks were as good as the ones the USA used, but they weren't perfect. No tanks were. Put enough armor-piercing and incendiary bullets through them and they'd burn, all right.

This one did. Fire licked back from the wing. The portside engine started burning, too. "You nailed his ass!" Rolvaag shouted as the Razorback's pilot lost control and the bomber spiraled down toward the water.

"Yeah," Moss said. As long as he was in his dive, he didn't have to worry about Hound Dogs. Once he came out… Once he came out, he was down here, and they could dive on him.

You traded speed for altitude. To gain speed, you had to give up altitude. That was why fights that started three miles up in the sky often finished just above the ground. To get the altitude back, you had to give up speed. You were vulnerable to the fighters that hadn't dropped so low.

Another bomber plunged down toward Lake Erie. A moment later, so did the U.S. fighter that had shot it down. Moss eyed it, hoping the pilot could get out before it went into the water. No such luck. The squadron leader swore. Another one of the bright, eager youngsters he commanded wouldn't be coming home.

The Hound Dogs were a little slower down to the deck than the U.S. Wrights. Once they got there, though, they got between the U.S. fighters and the fleeing Razorbacks. By then, the Razorbacks were streaking towards occupied Ohio. The Confederates had brought up what seemed like all the antiaircraft in the world. Going after the bombers, especially down low like this, was liable to prove expensive.

Moss got on the all-squadron circuit: "Let's head for home, boys. We did what we were supposed to do. Those Razorbacks won't bother our shipping for a while."

"Some of those bastards won't ever bother it again," somebody said. Moss thought that was Red Geoffreys, who had every ounce of the killer instinct Marty Rolvaag was a hair short on. He couldn't be sure, though. There was a lot of other wireless traffic, and the earphones didn't reproduce anybody's voice real well.

A few pilots grumbled, but no one complained very much when he swung back toward the west. The Hound Dogs followed the Razorbacks down to the south. They were content to let the Wrights go. Moss nodded to himself. That was always a sign the guys on the other side had had enough of you.

He'd seen two Razorbacks go down. He knew his own squadron had lost at least one fighter. As the Wrights went back to their airstrip, the men made their claims about enemy aircraft shot down. To listen to them, the Confederates had lost half their Razorbacks and at least half a dozen Hound Dogs. Moss had heard-and made-enough excited claims to take all of them with a grain of salt. If you didn't see an airplane crash, you couldn't be sure it was really downed. Even if you did, two or three guys were liable to think they were the one who'd shot it out of the sky.

Rolvaag came on the element-only circuit: "Looks like we're down two, Major."

"Shit," Moss said. His wingman had done the count before he'd had the chance to. He wondered how many U.S. fighters the Hound Dogs would claim once they got back to their airstrip. If it were only two, he would have been amazed.

How much punishment could the Confederates take over Lake Erie before they decided their attacks cost more than they were worth? How much damage were they doing to U.S. shipping? How much to the U.S. airplanes that opposed them? Moss had no idea. He wondered whether anybody on either side did.

After too much experience with too many wars, he wouldn't have bet on it. They'd just go on till one side or the other couldn't stand it any more. Which one that would be, how long the whole bloody business would take… There alone in the cockpit, he shrugged. No way to tell, not ahead of time.

He wondered if he'd be around to see the end of it. He shrugged again. He'd got through the Great War in one piece. He hadn't even been scratched. But what did that prove? Nothing, and he knew it too well.

George Enos didn't mind getting bounced out of bed at half past five every morning. He didn't mind the calisthenics that followed, either. He would have got up earlier and worked harder had he been bringing in cod out on the Grand Bank.

Some people grumbled about the chow. He'd figured out nobody could do anything about that, not when the cooks here turned out meals for hundreds at a time. It wasn't terrible food, and you could make a pig of yourself, which he did. He poured down coffee with every meal, too. Sometimes he thought he'd have trouble going to sleep without it.

After breakfast came gunnery practice. He'd graduated from a one-pounder like those his father had served to a twin 40mm cannon. That gun probably would have amazed his old man. It sure amazed him. It was a Swedish design, built under license in the USA, and it could put a hell of a lot of shells in the air.

Chief Isbell, the gunnery instructor, was another one of those broad-beamed, gray-stubbled CPOs. The Navy seemed to have a factory that turned them out as needed. They were, if not the brains of the outfit, at least its memory. Behind Isbell's back-but only behind his back-the raw seamen he taught called him the Bald Eagle: when he took off his cap, which he did as little as he could, he showed the world a wide expanse of shining scalp.

He knew his business, though. "They come after you, you start shooting like a bunch of mad bastards, you hear?" he said one morning. "Start shooting before you really start aiming. Just point it sorta at the fuckers comin' your way and let fly."

"What the hell good will that do, Chief?" somebody asked.

Isbell spelled it out like a third-grade teacher working on the multiplication table with a class full of dumbbells: "I'll tell you what, by God." He laid an affectionate hand on the barrel of the gun, the way a husband might on his wife's behind. A stab of longing for Connie pierced George to the root, but only for a moment, for Isbell went on, "For one thing, you're liable to scare him away. These babies put out muzzle flashes as long as your arm. He sees 'em, he knows you're going after him. Not everybody's a hero. Sucker in that airplane may decide he'd rather go home to his girlfriend than press home and maybe get shot down. Even if he does press home, he won't do it as well as he would have if you weren't banging away at him. You see what I mean?"

A few would-be sailors nodded.

"You see what I mean?" Isbell growled.

"Yes, Chief!" the men chorused.

Isbell nodded. "That's more like it. I spend my breath talking to you puppies, I want to know you're paying attention. I don't like wasting my time, you know what I mean?" He paused and lit a cigarette. After his first drag, he made a face. "Damn thing tastes like horseshit." That didn't stop him from smoking it down to a tiny butt as he continued, "Other thing you gotta remember is, ammo's cheap. Ships are a lot more expensive." He looked the trainees up and down. "You guys might be worth a little somethin', too, but I wouldn't count on it a whole hell of a lot."

So there, George thought. An old-fashioned two-decker flew back and forth, towing a cloth target at the end of a long line. No matter how long the line was, one eager-beaver group almost shot down the target tug instead of the target. The Bald Eagle waxed eloquent on the shortcomings of the material the Navy had to use these days. That, in its way, was also rather like walking into an unexpected volley of 40mm ammunition.

George's group did better. He wasn't sure they hit the target, but they did scare it. "I've seen worse," Isbell declared. From him, that was high praise.

After the session, George went up to the chief and said, "My father used to serve a one-pounder on a destroyer in the last war."

"Those goddamn things." Isbell spoke with a mixture of affection and exasperation that George understood from training on such a gun. "You had to be lucky to hit an airplane with 'em, but you sure could make a sub say uncle if you caught it on the surface. What ship, kid?"

George was past thirty. Nobody'd called him kid for quite a while. If anyone had the right, though, it was somebody like the Bald Eagle. "He was on the Ericsson," he answered.

Isbell's face changed. Every Navy veteran knew about the Ericsson. "At the end?" he asked. George nodded. To his amazement, the Bald Eagle set a hand on his shoulder. "That's rough, kid. I'm sorry as hell." All at once, the chief's gaze sharpened. "Wait a minute. You're Enos. Are you related to the Enos gal who…?"

"Who shot the Confederate submersible skipper? That was my mother," George said proudly.

"Fuck me." Isbell made the obscenity sound like a much more sincere compliment than the one he'd given the gun crew. "You want antiaircraft duty, kid? You been making noises like you do. I bet you can have it. Personnel ain't gonna say no, not to somebody with your last name."

"I've… thought about that," George said. "I don't want to get anything just on account of who my mother and father were."

"You've got an angle. You've got an in. You'd have to be nuts not to use 'em," Isbell said. "Life gives you lemons, make lemonade."

George had heard plenty of advice he liked less. He said, "Is there any way I can get to sea faster than usual?"

But Isbell just laughed at that, laughed and shook his head. "Nope. Sorry, Enos, but that ain't gonna happen. You gotta know what you gotta know, and the Navy's gotta know you know what you gotta know. Nothing personal-don't get me wrong-but if they put you on a ship before that, you're liable to be more of a menace than a help, if you know what I mean."

With a tight, sour smile, George changed the subject. He did know what the Bald Eagle meant, and wished he didn't. A couple of times, he'd gone on a fishing run with men who didn't know what the hell they were doing, men who were trying the fisherman's life for the first time. Even when they were eager to work, they might as well have been so many kittens. They got in everybody's way and caused more trouble than they were worth.

And then he realized that, once upon a time, he'd been one of those kittens himself. How had the old-timers put up with him when he first started going out to fish? He'd been sixteen, seventeen, something like that: somebody the phrase green as paint was made for. The other guys had probably remembered what they were like when they first put to sea. That was the only explanation that made any sense to him. If he saw any of them again, he'd have to buy them a beer and thank them for their patience.

He worked hard on antiaircraft gunnery. He got practice firing bigger guns, too, as he had on the Lamson. The men in training didn't get to handle full-sized big-gun ammunition. The guns had subcaliber practice rounds, which couldn't do as much harm if something went wrong and which, as the CPO in charge of those guns (a near twin to Bald Eagle Isbell, except that he had a full head of graying hair) pointed out, were a hell of a lot cheaper than the real thing.

And he tried to learn the other things the Navy threw at him. Like anybody who'd made more than a few fishing runs, he was a pretty fair amateur mechanic. He'd fiddled with the Sweet Sue's diesel several times, and made things better more often than he'd made them worse. He'd learned on the Lamson, though, that, just as sailing on a fishing boat wasn't enough to let him go to sea right away on a warship, so fiddling with a diesel didn't teach him what he needed to know about the care and feeding of a steam turbine.

Some guys bitched about the classwork. Morris Fishbein asked the overage lieutenant who was teaching them, "Why do we need to know this, sir? Most of us aren't going into the black gang."

"I know that, Fishbein," the officer answered. "But if your ship takes a bomb or a shell or a torpedo and they have casualties down there, the men left alive will be screaming for help as loud as they can. And when they get it, they won't want a bunch of thumb-fingered idiots who don't know their ass from the end zone. They'll want people who can actually do them some good. Not all of you will be gunners, either, but you're learning to handle guns. Well, a ship's engine is just as much a weapon as her guns are."

The answer made more than enough sense to keep George happy. And the Navy knew how to ram home what people needed to learn. He wished his high-school teachers had been half as good. He might have stayed in long enough to graduate.

By the time he had both the training and the hands-on work on the Lamson, he thought he could have built an engine from scratch. He was wrong, of course, but a little extra confidence never hurt anybody.

Men applied for specialist schools: those who really would go into the black gang, men who'd handle the wireless and Y-ranging gear, cooks. There was a gunnery school, too. George put in for it. He let Bald Eagle Isbell know he had.

"Way to go, kid," the CPO said. "Tell you what I'll do. I'll bend a few people's ears. I know the right ones to talk to. I'd goddamn well better by now, eh? I've been at this business long enough."

"Thanks very much, Chief," George said.

"You're welcome," Isbell answered matter-of-factly. "I wouldn't do it if I didn't think you had the makings. That wouldn't be fair to whoever you shipped with. But you can do the job, so why the hell not?"

Lists of those assigned to this, that, or the other school appeared on the door outside the camp's administrative offices. George scanned them eagerly. His name wasn't on the one for the gunnery school, but it wasn't on any of the other lists, either. He wondered if the Navy really wanted him for anything at all.

And then, after a week of what felt like the worst anticlimax in the world, he found his name. Actually, Morrie Fishbein, who was standing beside him to check the lists, found it for him. Fishbein gave him a nudge with an elbow and said, "Hey, George, here you are."

"What? Where? Lemme see," George said. Fishbein pointed. George looked. "Gunnery school! Yeah!" He pumped his fist in the air. Then he remembered the other man. "What about you, Morrie? You anywhere?"

"Doesn't look like it." Fishbein sounded mournful. "I don't think anybody gives a damn about me." George hadn't been the only one with such worries, then.

A yeoman came out of the office and stuck another list to the door with a piece of masking tape. Morrie turned away in dejection. George took a look at it. ", 'Fishbein, Morris D.,' " he read. "It's the antisubmersible-warfare list. They're going to teach you to throw ashcans at subs-either that or put earphones on you and show you how to really use that sound-ranging gear they've got."

"Oh, yeah?" The other man turned back. George aimed an index finger to show him his name. Fishbein thought it over. "Antisub… That's not too bad. They could've sent me plenty of worse places. Minesweeping, for instance." He shuddered at the mere idea.

"If I didn't get gunnery, I would've wanted antisub," George said. "You sink one of those bastards for me, you hear?"

"Sure as hell try," Fishbein said. "If you don't get them, they get you."

"You'd best believe it," George said. "Like the chaplain tells us every Sunday-it is better to give than to receive."

He realized too late that Fishbein listened to his chaplain on Saturday, if he listened at all. But the New Yorker laughed. "That's pretty goddamn funny, George."

George checked the lists again. "They're going to ship us out this afternoon. Better throw your stuff in your duffel."

"Uh-huh." Fishbein stopped laughing. "Ain't that a pisser? Everything you got in the world, and you can sling it over your shoulder."

"Just one of those things," George answered with a shrug. He'd been used to living with not much more than a duffel's worth of stuff for weeks at a time when he went on a fishing run. To someone new to the sea, though, it couldn't be easy.

He stared at the list again. Gunnery school. He nodded to himself. He thought the father he didn't remember well enough would approve.

Hipolito Rodriguez turned off the lights in the farmhouse kitchen. As always these days, he did it with enormous respect, after first making sure the floor under his feet was dry. He'd been careless once, and it had almost killed him. If Magdalena hadn't come out of the bedroom and knocked him away from the switch he couldn't let go of on his own, it would have finished the job in short order.

From what he'd heard since, she was lucky she hadn't stepped in the water herself, or the treacherous electricity would have seized her, too. Electricity was a strong servant, yes. Like anything strong, though, it could use its strength for good or ill. He'd found that out. He hoped one lesson would last him a lifetime.

When he went into the front room, Magdalena asked, "How are you?"

"I'm all right. I'm not made of glass, you know," he answered. His wife gave him a look that said she didn't believe a word of it. He still hadn't got back all his strength and coordination. Sometimes he wondered if he ever would, or if he'd remain a lesser man than he once had been.

He frowned. He wished he hadn't thought of it like that. He was a lesser man than he had been in some other ways, too. He wasn't quite no man at all, but the electricity hadn't done that any good, either.

Magdalena hadn't complained. She'd done everything she could to help him. He was discovering that women got less upset about such things than did the men to whom they happened. That was a small relief, even if one he would rather not have had.

To keep from worrying about his shortcomings, he said, "I'm going to turn on the wireless. It's just about time for the news."

"All right." Magdalena didn't tell him to be careful when he turned on the set. She never told him anything like that. She knew he had his pride. Whether she said it or not, though, he knew what she was thinking. And he was careful when he turned it on. He thought he always would be.

Click! The set was on. He stepped away from it. Nothing had happened to him. Absurd to feel relief at that, but he did. Then he stepped back and turned the tuning knob to the station he wanted.

As usual when the wireless hadn't been on for a while, the sound needed a bit of time to show up. When it did, the announcer was in the middle of a sentence: "-the news in a moment, after these brief messages." An improbably cheerful chorus started singing the praises of a brand of kitchen cleanser. By Magdalena's sniff, it wasn't a brand she thought much of.

Another chorus, this one full of deep, masculine voices, urged people to buy Confederate war bonds. Rodriguez had already done that: as many as he could afford. "Bonds and bullets, bonds and bombs!" they chanted, drums thudding martially in the background. Just hearing them made you want to give money to the cause.

Their music faded. The familiar fanfare that led off the news followed. "Now it is time to tell you the truth," the announcer said. "Yankee air pirates were severely punished in raids over Virginia and Kentucky last night. Confederate bombers struck hard at Yankee shipping in the Great Lakes yesterday. U.S. industry cannot keep making munitions if it cannot get supplies."

"Es verdad. Tiene razon," Rodriguez said. His wife nodded-she thought it was true and the newsman was right, too.

"In Utah, poison-gas attacks did not make the Mormon freedom fighters rebelling against Yankee tyranny pull back from Provo," the newsman went on. "And in New Mexico, a daring raid by the Confederate Camel Corps caused the destruction of a U.S. ammunition dump outside of Alamogordo. The shells and bombs would have been used against Confederate women and children in Texas."

Rodriguez found himself nodding. That was how the damnyankees did things, all right.

"There were minor raids by Red mallate bandits in Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina over the past few days," the newsreader said. "None of them did much damage, and the Negroes were driven off with heavy losses." Rodriguez nodded again. If blacks in the CSA took up arms against the government, they deserved whatever happened to them. Even if they didn't…

"And in Richmond, President Jake Featherston announced the formation of the Confederate Veterans' Brigades," the newsman said. "These men, while no longer fit for the demands of modern war, will free younger men now serving behind the lines to go up to the front."

More singing commercials followed. Rodriguez listened to them with half an ear. When they went away, the newsman gave football scores from across the CSA. Rodriguez waited for the score of the Hermosillo-Chihuahua match. It had ended up 17-17. He sighed. He'd hoped for a win, but Chihuahua had been favored, so he didn't suppose he could be too disappointed that the team from the Sonoran capital had managed to earn a tie.

After the sports came the weather forecast. Rodriguez did about as well by going outside and watching the clouds and feeling the breeze as the weathermen did with all their fancy gadgets. He listened anyway, not least so he could laugh at them when they turned out to be wrong.

Music came back after more commercials. He listened for a while, then got up and yawned and stretched. "Estoy cansado. I'm going to bed," he said.

"I'm tired, too," his wife agreed. She turned off the wireless. Rodriguez didn't say anything. If he had, she would have told him she was closer to the set than he was. It would have been the truth, too, but not all of the truth.

When they lay down together, he wondered if he would know the sweetness of desire. It had been a while. But nothing happened. He sighed once more, yawned, rolled over, and fell asleep.

He was chivvying a chicken into the henhouse the next morning when an auto pulled off the road and stopped not far from the barn. He blinked. That didn't happen every day-or every month, either. The motorcar wasn't new, and hadn't been anything special when it was: a boxy, battered Birmingham with bulbous headlights that stuck out like a frog's eyes. Out of it stepped Robert Quinn.

The Freedom Party organizer hadn't come to Baroyeca to get rich-or if he had, he'd been out of his mind. He hadn't got rich, either. That was one of the reasons he commanded so much respect in town. He was doing what he believed in, not what would serve his own selfish interests.

Rodriguez waved to him. "Hola, Senor Quinn. What can I do for you today?"

"Well, I thought I'd come by and see how you were doing, Senor Rodriguez," Quinn replied. "How do you feel?"

"From what the doctor said, I am doing about the way I should be," Rodriguez said. "I wish I were better, but I could be worse. I am not shockingly bad, anyhow."

Quinn made a face at him. "I see the electricity did not fry your brains-or maybe I see that it did."

"Would you like to come in the house?" Rodriguez asked. "If you have the time, we could drink a bottle of cerveza."

"Muchas gracias. I would like that," Quinn said. "I have a question I would like to ask you, if you don't mind." I want something from you, was what he meant. But he was too smooth, too polite, to say so straight out. Maybe he would have when he first came to Baroyeca from the more bustling northeast of the Confederate States. But he'd learned to fit into the Sonoran town's slower rhythms.

"I would be very pleased to hear it," Rodriguez said. "Just let me attend to this miserable hen first…" He waved his hat. The hen, which had paused to peck in the gravel, squawked irately and retreated. He got it back where it belonged and slammed the door on it. Then he raised his voice: "Magdalena, we have company. Senor Quinn has come to ask me something."

His wife came out onto the front porch. She nodded to Robert Quinn. "Very good to see you, senor."

"And you as well." Quinn's answering nod was almost a bow.

"Come in, come in," Rodriguez said. "Magdalena, would you get us some beer, por favor?"

"Of course," she answered. If they'd been down to their last bottle of beer and had nothing else on the farm, Quinn would have got it. Not only that-he would have got it in a way that said they had plenty more, even if they didn't.

Rodriguez settled his guest in the most comfortable chair. That was the one he usually sat in himself, but the next best would do. Magdalena brought in two bottles of beer. She served Quinn first. "Thank you very much," he said, and raised his bottle to Rodriguez. "?Salud!"

The simple toast-health-meant more than it would have before Rodriguez almost electrocuted himself. "?Salud!" he echoed feelingly. He sipped at the beer. "Ask me your question, Senor Quinn."

"I will, never fear." Quinn nodded to the wireless set. "Did you hear any news last night?"

"Some," Rodriguez said, surprise in his voice: that wasn't the sort of question he'd expected.

Robert Quinn went on, "Did you hear the news about what President Featherston is calling the Confederate Veterans' Brigades?"

"Yes, I did hear that," Rodriguez answered. "It struck me as being a good idea."

"It struck me the same way," Quinn said. "It is something this country needs when we fight an enemy larger than we are. I was wondering if you had thought about joining the Veterans' Brigades yourself."

"I see," Rodriguez said. "Before my… my accident, I was wondering whether los Estados Confederados would call me back to the colors to fight at the front, not behind it."

"Asi es la vida," Quinn said. "The way things are now, you would probably not do well with a Tredegar automatic rifle in your hands." He was being polite, and Rodriguez knew it. If he put on the butternut uniform again, he would be almost as big a danger to his own compadres as he would to the damnyankees. Robert Quinn added, "But you also serve your country if you free up a fitter man to fight. That is what the Confederate Veterans' Brigades are for."

"I understand. But one thing I am not so sure I understand is who would take care of the farm if I went away. My one son is already in the Army. The other two are bound to be conscripted soon. Magdalena cannot possibly do everything by herself."

"People can do all sorts of things when they find they have to," Quinn remarked. "But the Freedom Party looks out for the people. You would have your salary, of course. And the Party would pay your wife an allowance that would go a long way toward making up for your being gone."

"Well, that is not so bad," Rodriguez said. "It gives me something to think about, anyhow."

"You might do better not to think too long. So far, the Confederate Veterans' Brigades are voluntary." Quinn paused to let that sink in before continuing, "I do not know when, or if, men our age will be conscripted into them. But I know it could happen. This is war, after all. If you volunteer, you will have the best chance to get the assignment you might want. You could patrol the dams in the Tennessee Valley to guard against sabotage, or you could guard the mallates taken in arms against the Confederate States, or-"

He knew what levers to pull. He even knew not to name guarding the Negroes first, lest it seem too obvious. "I will think about that," Rodriguez said. Robert Quinn didn't even smile.

The fighting off to the west, in the direction of Sandusky, had picked up again. If the racket of the small-arms and artillery fire hadn't told Dr. Leonard O'Doull as much, the casualties coming into the aid station near Elyria, Ohio, would have. There seemed to be no easy times, just hard ones and harder.

O'Doull stepped out of the tent for a cigarette. He made sure everyone did that, and set his own example. Smoking around ether wasn't the smartest thing you could do. All he'd had before was green-gray canvas with a big Red Cross on it between him and the noise of battle. Somehow, things sounded much louder out here. Back in the tent, of course, he'd been concentrating on his job. That helped make the world go away. A cigarette couldn't equal it.

He smoked anyway, enjoying the ten-minute respite he'd given himself. His boots squelched in mud as he walked about. It wasn't raining now, but it had been, and the gray clouds rolling in off the lake said it would again before too long. He would have thought both sides would have to slow down in the rain. Things had worked like that in the Great War, anyhow. Here, they didn't seem to.

And then the shout of, "Hey, Doc! Doc!" made him stamp out the cigarette and mutter a curse under his breath. So much for the respite. War didn't know the meaning of the word.

"I'm here," he yelled, and ducked back into the tent.

Stretcher-bearers brought in the casualty half a minute later. At first, O'Doull just saw another wounded man. Then he noticed the fellow wore butternut, not green-gray. He made a small, surprised noise. Eddie-one of the corpsmen-said, "We found him, so we brought him in. Their guys do the same for our wounded. Sometimes we bump into each other when we're making pickups-swap ration cans for good tobacco, shit like that."

Such things were against regulations. They happened all the time anyhow. O'Doull wasn't about to get up on his high horse about them. They wouldn't change who won and who lost, not even a little bit. And he had the wounded Confederate here. "What's going on with him?" he asked.

What was going on was pretty obvious: a shredded, bloodied trouser leg with a tourniquet on it. "Shell blew up too damn close," Eddie answered. "You think you can save the leg?"

"Don't know yet," O'Doull said. "Let's get his pants off him and have a look." As the corpsman started cutting away the cloth, O'Doull added, "You gave him morphine, right? That's why he's not talking and yelling and raising a fuss? He's not shocky? He doesn't look it."

Eddie nodded. "Right the first time, Doc. Gave him a big old dose. He was screamin' his head off when we found him, but the dope's taken hold pretty good."

The wounded Confederate opened his eyes. They were startlingly blue. O'Doull wasn't sure the man was seeing him or anything else this side of God. In a faraway voice, the soldier said, "Don't hardly hurt at all no more."

"Good. That's good, son." O'Doull tried to sound as reassuring as he could. One look told him that leg was going to have to come off. It was a miracle the Confederate hadn't bled out before Eddie got to him. Or maybe not a miracle-his hands were all bloody. Maybe he'd held on literally for dear life and slowed things down enough to give himself a chance to survive. O'Doull turned to Granville McDougald. "As soon as he's on the table, get him under. We've got work to do." With the soldier conscious, he didn't want to say any more than that.

McDougald nodded. "Right, Doc." He didn't say anything else, either. But he could see what was what at least as well as O'Doull could.

Grunting, Eddie and the other corpsman got the Confederate off the stretcher and onto the operating table. Granville McDougald stuck an ether cone over the soldier's nose. The fellow feebly tried to fight; ether was nasty stuff. Then he went limp. Eddie said, "You are gonna have to amputate, aren't you?" He could see what was what, too.

"You bet," O'Doull answered. "Got to be above the knee, too. That makes learning to walk with an artificial leg harder, but look at his thigh. I'll be damned if I see how the burst missed cutting the femoral artery. That would've been curtains right there. But it sure as hell tore everything else to cat's meat."

"If it's above the knee anyhow, do it pretty high," McDougald advised. "You can pack more tissue below the end of the bone for a good stump."

"Right," O'Doull said. "You want to do it yourself, Granny? He'd have just as good a result with you cutting as he would with me." He meant it; the other man was a thoroughly competent medical jack of all trades.

But McDougald shook his head. "Nah. You go ahead. You got me up here passing gas. I'll go on with that." He didn't say he made a better anesthetist than O'Doull would. Whether he said it or not, they both knew it was true.

"All right, then." The more O'Doull considered the wound, the less happy he got. "It will have to be high. Some of this flesh is just too damn tattered to save. Tabernac!" Every once in a while, he still swore in Quebecois French. Constant use had brought his English out of dormancy in a hurry, though.

He got to work, repairing what he could, removing what he had to, picking out shell fragments and bits of cloth driven into the Confederate's wounds, and dusting sulfa powder over them. That could have gone on a lot longer than it did, but he didn't need to worry about the damage below mid-thigh.

"Give me the bone saw, Eddie," he said when he was ready for it. The corpsman handed it to him. He used it. Cutting through even the longest, strongest bone in the body didn't take long. The leg fell away from its former owner.

"Very neat, Doc," McDougald said. He'd watched the whole procedure with his usual intelligent interest. "You fixed that up better than I thought you could."

It wasn't over yet. O'Doull still had to make the fleshy pad below the femur and suture the flaps of skin he'd left attached for that purpose. But McDougald was right: that was just follow-up. He'd finished the challenging part.

"How's he look?" he asked.

"He's pretty pink. Pulse is strong. These young ones are tough. He's got a decent chance of coming through," McDougald answered.

"Keep him doped up," O'Doull said. "I don't want him feeling all of this till it's had the chance to settle down a little bit. Be a shame to lose him to shock when we've got what looks like such a good result."

"Too bad he's not one of ours," Eddie said, though he'd brought in the Confederate.

"Nothing we can do about that," O'Doull said. "Geneva Convention says we take care of wounded from both sides the same way. Only common sense that we do, too. If we don't, the Confederates won't for our guys."

"I suppose." But Eddie still didn't sound happy about it.

"We can question him while he's all doped up," Granville McDougald said. "If he knows anything, he'll spill his guts."

That bent the rules if it didn't actually break them. O'Doull thought about saying so. Then he looked at the Confederate soldier's tunic: two stripes on his sleeve. The man was only a corporal. Whatever he knew, it wouldn't matter much. Besides, O'Doull had no doubt the Confederates did the same thing. Who wouldn't? He kept his mouth shut.

Eddie took the canteen off his belt and sloshed it suggestively. "Want to celebrate pulling him through?"

Where had he come up with booze? O'Doull laughed at himself for even wondering. It wasn't hard. The corpsman would just claim it was medicinal if anyone came down on him for it. He didn't let whatever he scrounged interfere with the job he did. As far as O'Doull was concerned, nothing else mattered.

As for the offer… The doctor shook his head. "Ask me when I'm not on duty and I'll say yes. Till then, I'll pass. I don't want to do anything that might make me screw up a case. That wouldn't be fair to the poor sorry bastards who depend on me to patch 'em up the best way I know how."

"I know plenty of docs who'd say yes so fast, it'd make your head swim," Eddie said.

O'Doull only shrugged. "That's their business. I've got to mind mine."

"All right. All right." By his shrug, Eddie thought O'Doull was nuts, but most likely in a harmless way. The corpsman went on, "I'm going to clean up and go see who else got lucky out there." He spoke with a casual lack of concern that sounded more cold-blooded than it was. When he went out there, he could "get lucky" as easily as anyone else-more easily than most, for he exposed himself to more fire than any normal soldier in his right mind would have. Yes, he wore Red Cross armbands and smock and had Red Crosses on the front and back of his helmet, but not everybody paid attention to that kind of thing. And machine-gun bullets and shell fragments flew more or less at random. What did they care about the Red Cross? Not a thing, not a single thing.

After Eddie headed off toward the front, McDougald said, "You've got pretty good sense, Doc."

"Oh, yeah? Then why did I put the uniform back on? What the hell am I doing here?" O'Doull said. "It isn't for the pay and it isn't for the scenery, that's for goddamn sure."

The other man chuckled. "Why? On account of you're good at what you do, that's why. Sometimes, if you're good at what you do, you've got to go do it where it's hardest or where you can do the most good with it. That's how it looks to me, anyway. But what the deuce do I know? If I had any brains, I'd be out in California laying on the beach and soaking up something with a lot of rum in it."

O'Doull scrubbed at his hands with water and disinfectant. He used soap and a toothpick to get blood out from under his nails. He always kept them trimmed short, which helped, but not enough. Lying on a beach soaking up something with a lot of rum in it sounded pretty good to him, too. But he knew what sounded better: "I wish I were home."

"Yeah, there is that, too." McDougald nodded. "For you there is, anyway. Me, I'm a lifer at this-and if that doesn't prove I haven't got any brains, screw me if I know what would."

"You said it yourself, Granny," O'Doull answered. "You're good at what you do, and you're doing it where it counts most. Next question?"

He got another small laugh from McDougald. "Well, maybe I have picked up a trick or two over the years. I'd better. I've been at this game long enough, you know." He wasn't one to parade his knowledge, which was at least as extensive as O'Doull's even if less formally gained. He wasn't one to make a big fuss about anything-something a lot of men who'd spent a lot of time in the Army had in common.

"I'm glad to have you here, I'll tell you that," O'Doull said, "especially when the chips are down."

"Well, thanks very much. I expect you're making more out of it than there is to make, but thanks all the same," McDougald said. "I'm just a gas-passer who can do a little sewing and cutting when I have to, that's all."

"Bullshit." O'Doull didn't always cuss in French. Sometimes only English had the word he needed. "Maybe you couldn't teach this stuff at a medical school, but you can sure as hell do it better than most of the docs who do teach it. When the war's done, you ought to go back to school and pick up your M.D."

Granville McDougald shrugged. "Have to pick up a bachelor's first. Hell, I'm lucky I got out of high school."

Before O'Doull could answer, a salvo of Confederate shells roared by overhead. Somebody'd be sorry when they came down. "You call this luck?" O'Doull asked. McDougald only shrugged.