Return engagement

II

Somewhere down below Major Jonathan Moss was Ohio, somewhere Kentucky. He saw the ribbon of the Ohio River, but could not for the life of him have said which side of it he was on, not just then. He'd just broken off a dogfight with a Confederate fighter pilot who'd run into a cloud to get away from him, and he didn't know north from his elbow.

Then he saw shells bursting on the ground, and he realized that had to be Ohio. The CSA had kicked the USA in the teeth, attacking without bothering to declare war first. The Confederates had the edge right now. They were across the river in Indiana and Ohio, across with infantry and artillery and barrels, and they were pushing forward with everything they had.

No Great War army had ever moved like this. Moss knew that from experience. Going from Niagara Falls to Toronto had taken three long, bloody years. The Canadians had defended every foot of ground as if they were holding Satan's demons out of heaven. And, with trenches and machine guns, they'd been able to make every foot of ground count, too. Moss had started out flying a Curtiss pusher biplane, observing the front from above. He'd imagined himself a knight of the air. He'd ended up an ace in a fighting scout, knowing full well that his hands were no cleaner than any ground-pounding foot slogger's.

Living conditions were better for fliers, though. He hadn't got muddy. He'd had his own cot in a barracks hall or tent out of artillery range of the front. He'd eaten regularly, and well. And people with unpleasant attitudes had tried to kill him only every once in a while, not all the time.

So here he was back again for another round, something he never would have imagined when the Great War ended. He'd spent a lot of years as a lawyer specializing in occupation law in Canada. He'd married a Canadian woman. They'd had a little girl. And a Canadian bomb-maker had blown them up, maybe under the delusion that that would somehow help Canada toward freedom. It wouldn't. It couldn't. It hadn't. All it had done was wreck his life and drive him back to flying fighters.

He pushed the stick forward. The Wright 27 dove. The ground swelled. So did the Confederate soldiers and barrels in front of Lebanon, Ohio-he thought it was Lebanon, anyway, and if he was wrong, he was wrong. He wasn't wrong about the advancing Confederates. Thanks to the barrels, they'd already smashed through trench lines that would have held up a Great War army for weeks, and the war was only a couple of days old.

Someone down there spotted him. A machine gun started winking. Tracers flashed past his wings. He jabbed his thumb down on the firing button on top of the stick. His own machine guns spat death through the spinning disk of his propeller. Soldiers on the ground ran or threw themselves flat. That damned machine gun suddenly stopped shooting. Moss whooped.

Here and there, Confederates with rifles took potshots at him. Those didn't worry him. If a rifle bullet knocked down a fighter, the pilot's number was surely up. He checked six as he climbed. No Confederate on his tail. In the first clash, the CSA's machines-they were calling them Hound Dogs-seemed more maneuverable, but U.S. fighters had the edge diving and climbing. Neither held any enormous advantage over the other.

The Confederates had some real antiaircraft guns down there. Puffs of black smoke appeared in midair not far from Moss' fighter. They weren't quite round; they were longer from top to bottom than side to side. "Nigger-baby flak," Moss muttered to himself. With extensions of gas out from the main burst that could have been arms and legs, the smoke patterns did bear a certain resemblance to naked black dolls.

A bang said a shell fragment had hit the fighter somewhere. Moss' eyes flicked anxiously from one gauge to another. No loss of oil pressure. No loss of coolant. No fuel leak. No fire. The controls answered-no cut wires or bad hydraulics. He breathed a sigh of relief. No damage done.

Trouble was, he hadn't done the Confederates on the ground much harm, either. They would keep right on pushing forward. They weren't trying to break into Lebanon, which looked to be heavily fortified. They were doing their best to get past it and keep pushing north. If it still had some U.S. soldiers in it afterwards… well, so what?

Neither side had fought that way during the Great War. Neither side could have. That had mostly been a war of shoeleather, with railroads hauling soldiers up to the front and with trucks lugging supplies. But no army then had moved faster than at a walk.

Things looked different here. Barrels were a lot faster than they had been a generation earlier. Trucks didn't just haul beans and bullets. They brought soldiers forward to keep up with the barrels. The internal-combustion engine was supercharging this war.

His fighter's internal-combustion engine was running out of gas. He streaked north to find another airstrip where he could refuel. He'd started the war in southern Illinois, but they'd sent him farther east right away. For the time being, the action was hottest along the central part of the Ohio River.

The strip he found wasn't even paved. He jounced to a stop. When he pulled back the canopy and started to get out of the fighter, a lieutenant on the ground shouted, "Can you go up again right away?"

Moss wanted nothing more than sleep and food and a big glass of something strong. But they didn't pay him for ducking out of fights. He said, "Fill me up and I'll go."

"Thanks-uh, thank you, sir," the young officer said. "Everybody down south is screaming for air support."

"Why aren't they getting more of it?" Moss asked as groundcrew men in coveralls gave the fighter gasoline. Another man in coveralls, an armorer, wordlessly held up a belt of machine-gun ammunition. Moss nodded. The armorer climbed a ladder and went to work on the airplane's guns.

"Why? 'Cause we got sucker-punched, that's why," the lieutenant said, which fit too well with what Moss had seen and heard in the past couple of hectic days. The younger officer went on, "God only knows how many airplanes they got on the ground, either, the sons of bitches."

"No excuse for that," Moss said. "No goddamn excuse for that at all."

"Yeah, I know," the lieutenant answered. "That doesn't mean it didn't happen. Some heads ought to roll on account of it, too."

"You bet your-" Moss broke off. Antiaircraft guns south of the airstrip had started banging. Through them, he heard the rising note of fighters. They were Confederates, too. The engine roar was slightly deeper than that of U.S. aircraft. And he was standing in what was at the moment a bomb with wings. He got out of the cockpit and leaped to the ground as fast as he could, shouting, "Run!"

None of the groundcrew men had needed the advice. They were doing their best to imitate Olympic sprinters. When bullets started chewing up the airstrip, some of them hit the dirt. Others ran harder than ever.

Three bullets slammed into the armorer's back. He was only a few bounds ahead of Jonathan Moss, who saw dust puff out from the man's coveralls at each hit. When the bullets went out through his belly and chest, they took most of his insides with them. He crumpled as if all his bones had turned to jelly. He was surely dead before he stopped rolling.

Moss wanted to go flat. He also wanted to get as far away from his fighter as he could. When he heard a soft whump! behind him and felt a sudden blast of heat at his back, he knew he'd been smart.

The Confederates came back for another strafing run. By then, Moss was on the ground, in a wet, muddy ditch by the side of the hastily made airstrip. Cold water helped fear make his balls crawl up into his belly. The lieutenant lay a few feet away from him, staring foolishly at his right hand. He had a long, straight, bleeding gouge along the back of it, but his fingers all seemed to work when he wiggled them.

"You're lucky as hell, kid," Moss said, glad to have something to talk about besides the pounding of his heart. "That's only a scratch, and you'll get yourself a Purple Heart on account of it."

"If I'd been lucky, they would have missed me," the lieutenant said, which held more than a little truth. If he'd been unluckier, though, all the infinite cleverness and articulation of that hand would have been smashed to bloody, bony ruin in less than the blink of an eye.

Ever so cautiously, Moss stuck up his head. The Confederate fighters-there'd been three of them-were streaking away. Futile puffs of flak filled the sky. He'd hoped to see at least one go down in flames, but no such luck. His own machine burned on the strip. The ammunition the luckless armorer had been loading into it started cooking off. Bullets flew in all directions. He ducked again.

"You have transportation?" he asked. "I've got to get to my unit, or at least to an air base with working fighters."

"There's an old Ford around here somewhere, if the Confederates didn't blow it to hell and gone," the young officer said. "If you want to put it on the road, you can do that. We don't exactly have control of the air right here, though."

That was a polite way to put it-politer than Moss could have found. What the shavetail meant was, If you start driving around, the Confederates are liable to shoot up your motorcar, and we can't do a whole hell of a lot to stop 'em.

"I'm not worth much to the country laying here in this goddamn ditch." Moss crawled out of it, dripping. "Point me at that Ford."

It was old, all right-so old, it was a Model T. Moss had never driven one in his life. His family had had too much money to get one. After the war, he'd gone around in a lordly Bucephalus for years-a make now extinct as the dodo, but one with a conventional arrangement of gearshift, clutch, and brake. He tried the slab-sided Ford, stalled it repeatedly, and had a devil of a time making it go. Finally, a corporal with a hard, flat Midwestern accent said, "Sir, I'll take you where you want to go. My folks are still driving one of them buggies."

"Thanks." Moss meant it. "I think I'm more afraid of this thing than I am of Confederate airplanes."

"All what you're used to." The corporal proceeded to prove it, too. Under his hands, the Model T behaved for all the world as if it were a normal, sane automobile. Oh, it could have stopped quicker, but you could say that about any motorcar of its vintage. The only way it could have gone faster than forty-five was by falling off a cliff, but that also turned out not to be a problem.

Refugees clogged every road north. Some had autos, some had buggies, some had nothing but shank's mare and a bundle on their backs. All had a serious disinclination to staying in a war zone and getting shot up. Moss couldn't blame them, but he also couldn't move at anything faster than a crawl.

And the Confederates loved shooting up refugee columns, too, just to make the madness worse. Moss had done that himself up in Canada during the Great War. Now he got a groundside look at what he'd been up to. He saw what people looked like when they burned in their motorcars. He smelled them, too. It put him in mind of roast pork. He didn't think he'd ever eat pork again.

Colonel Irving Morrell had always wanted to show the world what fast, modern barrels could do when they were well handled. And so, in a way, he was doing just that. He'd never imagined he would be on the receiving end of the lesson, though, not till mere days before the war broke out.

He would be fifty at the end of the year, if he lived that long. He looked it. His close-cropped sandy hair was going gray. His long face, deeply tanned, bore the lines and wrinkles that showed he'd spent as much time as he could in the sun and the wind, the rain and the snow. But he was a fit, hard fifty. If he could no longer outrun the men he commanded, he could still do a pretty good job of keeping up with them. And coffee-and the occasional slug of hooch-let him get by without a whole lot of sleep.

He would have traded all that fitness for a fat slob's body and an extra armored corps. The Confederates were putting everything they had into this punch. He didn't know what they were up to on the other side of the Appalachians, but he would have been amazed if they could have come up with another effort anywhere close to this one. If this wasn't the Schwerpunkt, everything he thought he knew about what they had was wrong.

His own barrel, with several others, lurked at the edge of the woods east of Chillicothe, Ohio. The Confederates were trying to get around the town in the open space between it and the trees. Morrell spoke into the wireless set that connected him to the others: "Wait till their move develops more fully before you open up on them. That's the way we'll hurt them most, and hurting them is what we've got to do."

"Hurt them, hell, sir," said Sergeant Michael Pound, the gunner. "We've got to smash them."

"That would be nice." Pound was nothing if not confident. He wasn't always right, but he was always sure of himself. He was a stocky, broad-shouldered man with very fair skin and blue eyes. He came from the uppermost Midwest, and had an accent that might almost have been Canadian.

He should have commanded his own barrel. Morrell knew as much. But he didn't want to turn Pound loose. The man was, without a doubt, the best gunner in the Army, and they'd spent a lot of time together in those periods when the Army happened to be interested in barrels. Pound had also done a stretch as an ordinary artilleryman during that long, dreary dry spell when the Army stopped caring that cannon and armor and engine and tracks could go together into one deadly package. Trouble was, the package was also expensive. To the Army, that had come close to proving the kiss of death.

It was, in fact, still liable to prove the kiss of death for a lot of U.S. soldiers. Even though the factories up in Pontiac were going flat out now, they'd started disgracefully late. The CSA had factories, too, in Richmond and Atlanta and Birmingham. They weren't supposed to have been working so long and so hard. But the Confederates were using more barrels than anybody in what was alleged to be U.S. Army Intelligence had suspected they owned.

Here came three of them, a leader and two more behind him making a V. They didn't look much different from the machine he commanded. They were a little boxier, the armor not well sloped to deflect a shell. But they hit hard; they carried two-inch guns, not inch-and-a-halfers. All things considered, U.S. and C.S. machines were about even when they met on equal terms.

Morrell didn't intend to meet the Confederates on equal terms. Hitting them from ambush was a lot more economical. "Range to the lead barrel?" he asked Sergeant Pound.

He wasn't surprised to hear Pound answer, "It's 320 yards, sir," without the slightest hesitation. The gunner had been traversing the turret to keep that barrel in the gunsight. He wasn't just ready. He was eager. That eagerness was part of what made him such a good gunner. He thought along with his commander. Sometimes he thought ahead of him.

"Let him have it," Morrell said.

"Armor-piercing, Sweeney!" Pound said, and the loader slammed a black-tipped round into the breech. The gunner traversed the turret a little more, working the handwheel with microscopic care. Then he fired.

The noise was a palpable blow to the ears. It was worst for Morrell, who'd just stuck his head out the cupola so he could see the effect of the shot. Fire spurted from the muzzle of the cannon and, half a second later, from the side of the Confederate barrel. Side armor was always thinner than at the front or on the turret.

"Hit!" Morrell shouted. "That's a goddamn hit!" Easier to think of it as the sort of hit you might make in a shooting gallery, with little yellow ducks and gray-haired mothers-in-law and other targets going by on endless loops of chain. Then you didn't have to contemplate that hard-nosed round slamming through armor, rattling around inside the fighting compartment, and smashing crewmen just like you-except they wore the wrong uniforms and they weren't very lucky.

Smoke started pouring from the wounded barrel, which stopped dead-and dead was the right word. A hatch at the front opened. A soldier in butternut coveralls-probably the driver-started to scramble out. Two machine guns opened up on him from Morrell's barrel. He crumpled, half in and half out of his ruined machine.

As Morrell ducked down inside the turret, it started traversing again. Sergeant Pound had commendable initiative. "Another round of AP, Sweeney!" he bawled. "We'll make meat pies out of 'em!" The loader gave him what he wanted. The gun bellowed again-to Morrell, a little less deafeningly now that he was back inside. The sharp stink of cordite filled the air inside the turret. The shell casing came out of the breech and clanged on the floor of the fighting compartment. It could mash toes if you weren't careful. Peering through the gunsight, Pound yelled, "Hit!" again.

"Was that us, or one of the other barrels here with us?" Morrell asked.

"Sir, that was us." The gunner was magisterially convincing. "Some of those other fellows couldn't hit a dead cow with a fly swatter."

"Er-right." Morrell stuck his head out of the cupola. All three of the lead Confederate barrels were burning now. Somebody in one of the other U.S. machines must have known what to do with his fly swatter.

A rifle shot from a Confederate infantryman cut twigs from the oaks above Morrell's head. He didn't duck. His barrel was well back in the shade. Nobody out there in the open could get a good look and draw a bead on him. That didn't mean a round not so well aimed couldn't find him, but he refused to dwell on such mischances.

He hoped the Confederates would try to charge his barrels. He could stand them off where he was for quite a while, then fall back to another position he'd prepared deeper in the woods. Defense wasn't his first choice, but that didn't mean he couldn't handle it. And the enemy, charging hard, might well be inclined to run right on to a waiting spear.

But the Confederates had something else in mind. After about ten minutes of confusion, they started lobbing artillery shells toward the woods. At first, Morrell was scornful-only a direct hit would make a barrel say uncle, and hits from guns out of visual range of their targets were hard as hell to come by. But then he caught the gurgling howl of the shells as they flew through the air and the white bursts they threw up when they walked toward the barrels.

Swearing, he ducked down into the turret and slammed the cupola hatch behind him. "Button it up!" he snarled. "Gas!" He got on the wireless to all the barrels he commanded, giving them the same message. "Masks!" he added to the men in his own machine. "That's an order, God damn it!"

Only when he put on his own mask did Pound and Sweeney reach for theirs. He couldn't see the driver and the bow gunner up at the front of the hull. He hoped they listened to him. If the barrel stayed buttoned up, the men would start to cook before too long. It might have been tolerable in France or Germany. In Ohio? Right at the start of summertime? In gas masks to boot?

Sergeant Pound asked an eminently reasonable question: "Sir, how the hell are we supposed to fight a war like this?"

"How would you like to fight it without your lungs?" Morrell answered. His own voice sounded even more distant and otherworldly than Pound's had. He couldn't see the gunner's expression. All he could see were Pound's eyes behind two round portholes of glass. The green-gray rubber of the mask hid the rest of the sergeant's features and made him look like something from Mars or Venus.

Looking out through the periscopes mounted in the cupola hatch was at best a poor substitute for sticking your head out and seeing what was going on. Shoving one of those glass portholes up close enough to a periscope to see anything was a trial. What Morrell saw were lots of gas shells bursting.

He did some more swearing. The barrel wasn't perfectly airtight, and it didn't have proper filters in the ventilation system. That was partly his own fault, too. He'd had a lot to say about the design of barrels. He'd thought about all sorts of things, from the layout of the turret to the shape of the armor and the placement of the engine compartment. Defending against poison gas hadn't once crossed his mind-or, evidently, anyone else's.

"What do we do, sir?" Sergeant Pound asked.

Morrell didn't want to fall back to that prepared position without making the Confederates pay a price. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a fierce grin the gas mask hid. "Forward!" he said, first to Pound, then on the intercom to the driver, and then on the wireless. "Let's see if those bastards want to drop gas on their own men."

The barrel rumbled ahead. Morrell hoped not too much gas was getting into the fighting compartment. He could tell the instant they came out into the sunlight from the shade of the trees. It had been hot in the barrel before. It got a hell of a lot hotter when the sun started beating down on the hull and the turret.

Bullets began hitting the barrel as soon as it came out into the open, too. Morrell didn't worry about ordinary rifle or machine-gun rounds very much, not while he wasn't standing up and looking out through the cupola. (He didn't worry about them while he was, either. Afterwards, sometimes, was a different story.) But the Confederates had the same sort of.50-caliber antibarrel rifles as U.S. troops. Even one of those big armor-piercing bullets wouldn't penetrate the front glacis plate or the turret, but it might punch through the thinner steel on the barrel's sides.

Sergeant Pound and the bow machine gunner, a redheaded mick named Teddy Fitzgerald, opened up on the Confederate soldiers they'd caught in the open. Pound abandoned the turret machine gun after a little while. "H.E.!" he called to Sweeney, who fed a high-explosive round into the cannon. It roared. Through the periscopes, Morrell watched the round burst. A couple of enemy soldiers went flying.

The Confederates didn't put gas down on top of their own men. They didn't break through east of Chillicothe, either. Morrell's barrels gave them a good mauling there. But they did break the U.S. line west of town. Morrell had to fall back or risk being surrounded. Even pulling back wasn't easy. He fought a brisk skirmish at long range with several C.S. barrels. If the Confederates had moved a little faster, they might have trapped him. He hated retreat. But getting cut off would have been worse. So he told himself, over and over again.

As Mary Pomeroy walked to the post office in Rosenfeld, Manitoba, with her son Alexander in tow, she laughed at herself. She'd always thought she couldn't hate anyone worse than the green-gray-clad U.S. soldiers who'd occupied the town since 1914. Now the Yanks, or most of them, were gone, and she discovered she'd been wrong. The soldiers from the Republic of Quebec, whose uniforms were of a cut identical to their U.S. counterparts but sewn from blue-gray cloth, were even worse.

For one thing, the Yanks, however much Mary despised them, had won the war. They'd driven out and beaten the Canadian and British defenders of what had been the Dominion of Canada. If not for them, there wouldn't have been any such thing as the Republic of Quebec. Quebec had been part of Canada for more than 150 years before the Yanks came along. The USA had no business splitting up the country.

For another, hardly any of the Quebecois soldiers spoke more than little fragments of English. You couldn't even try to reason with them, the way you could with the Yanks. Some Yanks-Mary hated to admit it, but knew it was true-were pretty decent, even if they did come from the United States. Maybe some Quebecois were, too. But if you couldn't talk to them, how were you supposed to find out? They jabbered away in their own language, and it wasn't as if Mary or anybody else in Rosenfeld had ever learned much French.

And not only did the men in blue-gray speak French, they acted French. She'd long since got used to the way American soldiers eyed her. They'd done it in spite of her wedding ring, later in spite of little Alec. She was a tall, slim redhead in her early thirties. Men did notice her. She'd grown used to that, even if she didn't care for it.

But the two Quebecois soldiers who walked by her were much more blatant in the way they admired her than the Yanks had been. It wasn't as if they were undressing her with their eyes-more as if they were groping her with them. And when, laughing, the Frenchies talked about it afterwards, she couldn't understand a word they said. By their tone, though, it was all foul and all about her. She looked straight ahead, as if they didn't exist, and kept on walking. They laughed some more at that.

"Are we almost there yet?" Alec asked. He'd be starting kindergarten before long. Mary didn't want to send him to school. The Yanks would fill him full of their lies about the past. But she didn't see what choice she had. She could teach him what he really needed to know at home.

"You know where the post office is," Mary said. "Are we almost there yet?"

"I suppose so," Alec said in a sulky voice. He didn't take naps any more. Mary missed the time when he had, because that had let her get some rest, too. Now she had to be awake whenever he was. But even if he didn't actually take naps any more, there were still days when he needed them. This felt like one of those days.

Mary did her best to pretend it didn't. "Well, then," she said briskly, "you know we cross the street here-and there it is."

There it was, all right: the yellow-brown brick building that had done the job since before the last war. The postmaster was the same, too, though Wilfred Rokeby's hair was white now and had been black in those distant days. Only the flag out front was different. Mary could barely remember the mostly dark blue banner of the Dominion of Canada. Ever since 1914, the Stars and Stripes had fluttered in front of the post office.

Alec swarmed up the stairs. Mary followed, holding down her pleated wool skirt with one hand against a gust of wind. She was damned if she'd give those Frenchies-or anybody else-a free show. She opened the door, the bronze doorknob polished bright by God only knew how many hands. Her son rushed in ahead of her.

Stepping into the post office was like stepping back in time. It was always too warm in there; Wilf Rokeby kept the potbellied stove in one corner glowing red whether he needed to or not. Along with the heat, the spicy smell of the postmaster's hair oil was a link with Mary's childhood. Rokeby still plastered his hair down with the oil and parted it exactly in the middle. Not a single hair was out of place; none would have dared be disorderly.

Rokeby nodded from behind the counter. "Morning, Mrs. Pomeroy," he said. "New notices on the bulletin board. Directions are I should tell everybody who comes in to have a look at 'em, so I'm doing that."

Mary wanted to tell the occupying authorities where to head in. Getting angry at Wilf Rokeby wouldn't do her any good, though, or the Yanks and Frenchies any harm. "Thank you, Mr. Rokeby," she said, and turned toward the cork-surfaced board with its thumbtack holes uncountable.

The notices had headlines in big red letters. One said, NO HARBORING ENEMY AGENTS! It warned that anyone having anything to do with people representing Great Britain, the Confederate States, Japan, or France would be subject to military justice. Mary scowled. She knew what military justice was. In 1916, the Yanks had taken her brother Alexander, for whom Alec was named, and shot him because they claimed he was plotting against them.

NO INTERFERENCE WITH RAILWAY LINES! the other new flyer warned. It said anyone caught trying to sabotage the railroad would face not just military justice but summary military justice. As far as Mary could tell, that meant the Yanks would shoot right away and not bother with even a farce of a trial. The notice was relevant for Rosenfeld. The town would have been only another patch of Manitoban prairie if two train lines hadn't come together there.

She turned back to Wilf Rokeby. "All right. I've read them. Now you can sell me some stamps without getting in trouble in Philadelphia."

"It wouldn't be quite as bad as that," the postmaster answered with a thin smile. "But I did want you to see them. You have to remember, it's a war again, and those people are jumpier than they used to be. And these here fellows from Quebec… I've got the feeling it's shoot first and ask questions later with them."

"I wouldn't be surprised," Mary said. "They hardly seem like proper human beings at all."

"Well, I don't know there," Rokeby said. "What I do know is, I wouldn't do anything foolish and get myself in trouble with 'em."

"Why do you think I would want to get myself in trouble with them?" Mary asked.

Rokeby shrugged. "I don't suppose you'd want to, exactly, but…"

"But what?" Mary's voice was sharp.

"But I recollect who your brother was, Mrs. Pomeroy, and who your father was, too."

Hardly anyone in Rosenfeld mentioned Arthur McGregor, her father, to her. He'd been blown up by a bomb he meant for General George Custer, who'd passed through the town on his way into retirement. All that was left of Arthur McGregor these days was his Christian name, which was Alec's middle name. And Mary couldn't remember the last time anyone had spoken of Alexander McGregor. A lot of people in town were too young even to remember him. Twenty-five years was a long time.

But she didn't quite like the way the postmaster had spoken of them. "What do you mean?"

"I mean I wouldn't like to see the same sort of thing happen to you as happened to them," Rokeby answered.

She stared at him. Except for Alec, they were the only two people in the post office, and Alec paid next to no attention to what grownups said to each other unless they started shouting or did something else interesting or exciting. "Why on earth would anything like that happen to me?" she asked, deliberately keeping her voice calm and her face straight.

"Well, I don't know," Wilf Rokeby said. "But I do recall a package you posted to a cousin of yours in Ontario not so long ago-a cousin named Laura Moss."

"Do you?" Mary said tonelessly.

The postmaster nodded. "I do. And I recall reading in the paper a little later on about what happened to a woman named Laura Moss."

What had happened to Laura Moss-who'd been born Laura Secord, descended from the Canadian patriot of the same name, and who'd been a Canadian patriot herself till she ended up in a Yank's bed-was that a bomb had blown her and her little girl sky high. "What's that got to do with me?" Mary asked, again with as little expression in her voice or on her face as she could put there. "Do you think I'm a bomber because my father was?" There. The challenge direct. What would Rokeby make of it?

He looked at her over the tops of the old-fashioned half glasses he wore. "Well, I don't know anything about that for certain, Mrs. Pomeroy," he said. "But I also believe I recollect a bomb that went off at Karamanlides' general store after he went and bought it from Henry Gibbon. He's from down in the USA, even if he's been here a while now."

"I didn't have anything to do with that-or with this other thing, either," Mary said. After the challenge direct, the lie direct.

Wilf Rokeby didn't raise an eyebrow. He didn't call her a liar. He showed not the slightest trace of anything but small-town interest. "Did I say you did, Mrs. Pomeroy?" he asked easily. "But I thought, with those new notices up there, you maybe ought to remember how nervous the Yanks and Frenchies are liable to be. You wouldn't want to do anything, oh, careless while you're near a train track, or anything like that."

The only place where Mary had ever been careless was in letting Rokeby get a look at the name on the package she'd posted. She didn't see how she could have avoided that, but she hadn't imagined he would remember it. It only went to show you never could tell.

She studied the postmaster. If he'd wanted to, he could have told the Yanks instead of bringing this up with her. Searching her apartment wouldn't have told them anything. Searching the basement of her apartment building would have. Her father's bomb-making tools were hidden, but they could be found.

So what did he want? Money? She and Mort had some, but not a lot. The same probably applied to Wilfred Rokeby. Did he want something else from her, something more intimate? He was a lifelong bachelor. He'd never had any sort of reputation for skirt-chasing. She'd heard a couple of people over the years wonder if he was a fairy, but nobody had ever had any real reason to think so except that he didn't have much to do with women.

"I always try to be careful," she said, and waited to see what would happen next.

Rokeby nodded. "Good. That's good. Your family's seen too many bad things. Wouldn't think you could stand a whole lot more of 'em."

"Can I buy those stamps now?" Mary asked in a tight voice.

"You sure can," the postmaster answered. "Just tell me what you need." She did. He got out the stamps and said, "That'll be a dollar and a half all told." She paid him. He nodded as he would have to any other customer he'd been seeing for years. "Thank you kindly, Mrs. Pomeroy. Like I say, you want to be careful, especially now that there's a war on."

"I heard you," Mary said. "Oh, yes. I heard you."

Alec in tow, she left the post office and started back to their apartment. They hadn't gone far before her son asked, "Mommy, what was that man talking about?"

It was a good question. Did Wilf Rokeby really sympathize with her? He hadn't told the Yanks and he hadn't asked for anything from her. He'd just warned her. So maybe he did. Could she trust everything to the strength of a maybe? She had to think about that. She had to think hard. She also had to tell Alec something. "Nothing important, sweetie," she said. "Grownup stuff, that's all." He accepted that with a nod. His question was easily answered. Her own? No.

When the last war broke out, Chester Martin had been a corporal taking a squad of U.S. soldiers from West Virginia into Virginia. He'd been through the mill, sure as hell, and he'd been lucky, too, as luck ran in wartime: three years of hard fighting, and only one wound. Back in 1914, he'd been a Democrat. He'd lived in Toledo.

A lot of things had changed since. He wasn't a kid any more. He was closer to fifty than forty. His light brown hair had gone gray. His features had been sharp, almost foxy. Now he had jowls and a belly that stuck out farther than his chest, though not much. He had a wife and a young son. He was a Socialist, a construction workers' organizer in Los Angeles.

He was a Socialist these days, yes. But he'd voted for Robert Taft in the 1940 presidential election, not Al Smith. He'd been through the mill. He didn't want to see the Confederate States strong. As his wife set a plate of ham and eggs in front of him, he said, "Things don't look so good back East."

"No, they don't," Rita agreed. Chester was her second husband. Her first had gone to war a generation earlier, but he hadn't come back. That was as much luck of the draw as Chester's survival. If you happened to end up in the wrong place at the wrong instant, you could be the best soldier in the world and it wouldn't matter one goddamn bit. Your next of kin would get a wire from the War Department, and that would be that.

"I wish…" Chester began, and then let it trail away.

He might as well not have bothered. Rita knew what he hadn't said. "It wouldn't have made any difference if Taft beat Al Smith," she said. "We'd still have a war right now, and we wouldn't be any readier than we are."

She was a Socialist, too. She'd never been anything else. Her folks were Socialists, where Chester's were rock-ribbed Democrats. And she sometimes had a hard time forgiving him when he backslid-that was how she looked at it, anyhow.

Here, she was probably right. Al Smith had agreed to the plebiscites in Houston and Sequoyah and Kentucky before the election. Even if Taft had won, they were scheduled for early January, before he would have been inaugurated. And once Kentucky and Houston went Confederate in the vote, could he have thrown out the elections? That would have touched off a war all by itself.

Of course, it would have touched off a war with Kentucky and what was once more west Texas in U.S. hands, which might have made things better. Chester almost said so-almost, but not quite. He and Rita had been married a while now. He'd learned a wise man didn't antagonize his wife over something inherently unprovable, especially when she'd just given him breakfast. He finished the ham and eggs and some toast, gulped his coffee, put on a cap, and headed out the door. Rita gave him a kiss as he left, too, one more reason to make him glad he hadn't got her angry.

"Chillicothe falls!" a newsboy shouted. "Read all about it!"

He forked over a nickel for a copy of the Los Angeles Times. He hated giving the Times his money. It thought labor unions were nothing but a bunch of Reds; reactionary didn't begin to go far enough to describe it. But it was the only morning paper he could buy on the way to the trolley stop. Sometimes convenience counted for more than ideology.

Another nickel went into the trolley's fare box, and four pennies for two transfers. He was going all the way down to Torrance, in the South Bay; he'd have to change trolleys twice. He plopped his fanny into a seat and opened up the Times. He had some time to kill.

Long shadows of early morning stretched out toward the west. The day was still cool, but wouldn't stay that way for long. It would be better in Torrance, which got the sea breeze, than here in Boyle Heights on the east side of town; the breeze didn't usually come in this far. It got hotter here than it ever did in Toledo. Chester didn't mind. Hot weather in Toledo was steam-bath central. He'd known worse in Virginia during the war, but Toledo was plenty bad. Next to that kind of heat, what L.A. got was nothing. Your clothes didn't stick to you. You didn't feel you'd fall over dead-or at least start panting like a hound dog-if you walked more than a hundred yards. And he didn't miss snow in the wintertime one bit.

His smile when he thought of not getting snowed on slipped as he read the lead story. Chillicothe wasn't the only Ohio town that had fallen to the Confederates. They looked to be pushing north through Ohio and Indiana with everything they had: men and airplanes and barrels and poison gas.

"God damn Jake Featherston," Chester muttered under his breath. Neither side had moved like this during the Great War. Machine guns had made attacks almost suicidally expensive. Railroads behind the lines had stayed intact. That meant defenders could move men forward faster than attackers could push through devastated terrain. That was what it had meant in the last war, anyhow. This time, trucks and barrels seemed to mean the rules had changed.

Other news wasn't good, either. Confederate bombers had hit Washington and Philadelphia again, and even New York City. The Empire of Japan had recalled its ambassador to the USA. That probably meant a new war in the Pacific, and sooner, not later. And the war in the Atlantic already looked insane, with ships from the USA, Germany, the CSA, Britain, and France all hammering at one another.

From what Chester remembered, the naval war in the Atlantic had been crazy the last time around, too. He didn't remember much of that, though. He'd been too busy trying not to get shot to pay it a whole lot of attention.

And Governor Heber Young of Utah said his state would react with "disfavor and dismay" if the USA tried to declare martial law there. Chester didn't have much trouble translating that into the kind of English somebody who wasn't the governor of a state might speak. If the United States tried to put their foot down in Utah, the state would explode like a grenade. Of course, if the United States didn't put their foot down in Utah, the state was liable to explode like a grenade anyhow. Mormons thought the USA had been oppressing them since before the Second Mexican War sixty years ago, if not longer than that. If they had a chance to break away and get their own back, wouldn't they grab it with both hands?

The French were claiming victories in Alsace-Lorraine. The Germans were loudly denying everything. They were also loudly denying that the Ukraine's army had mutinied when the Tsar's forces crossed the border from Russia. Maybe they were telling the truth and maybe they weren't. Time would show, one way or the other.

Suddenly sick of everything that had to do with the war, Chester turned to the sports section, which was mostly full of news of football games canceled. The Los Angeles Dons, his favorite summer league team, had been up in Portland to play the Wolves. Now a quarter of the squad had got conscription notices, and the rest were arranging transportation back to Los Angeles. He sighed. He hadn't really thought about what the war would do to ordinary life. He hadn't been part of ordinary life the last time around.

He got so engrossed in the paper, he had to jump off the trolley at the last moment to make one of his transfers. He was still reading when he got off in Torrance. He walked three blocks to the construction site the union was picketing. The builders had done everything under the sun to drive away the pickets. They'd even sicced Pinkerton goons on them. That hadn't worked; the union men had beaten the crap out of the down-and-outers the detective agency hired.

Chester expected more trouble here. What he didn't expect was a man of about his own age in a double-breasted gray pinstripe suit and a straw hat with a bright plaid hatband who came up to him, stuck out his hand, and said, "You must be Martin."

"Yeah." Chester automatically took the proffered hand. The other fellow didn't have a worker's calluses, but his grip was strong. Martin said, "Afraid I don't know you."

"I'm Harry T. Casson," the other man said.

Son of a bitch, Chester thought. Harry T. Casson might not have been the biggest builder in Los Angeles, but he was sure as hell one of the top three. He was also, not coincidentally at all, the man trying to run up the houses here. "Well, what do you want with me?" Chester asked, hard suspicion in his voice.

"Cooperation," Casson said. "Things are different with a war on, don't you think?"

"If you're going to try to use the war for an excuse to exploit the people who work for you, you can go straight to hell, far as I'm concerned," Chester said.

He almost hoped that would make Casson spit in his eye. It didn't. Calmly, the builder said, "That's not what I meant. I know I have to give some to get some."

Give some to get some? Chester had never heard anything like that before from the men who hired construction workers here. He wondered why he was hearing it now. Smelling a rat, he said, "You know what we want. Recognize the union, dicker with us in good faith over wages and working conditions, and you won't have any trouble with us. No matter what the L.A. goddamn Times says, that's all we've ever wanted."

Harry T. Casson nodded. He was a cool customer. He said, "We can probably arrange something along those lines."

"Christ!" Chester didn't want to show his astonishment, but he couldn't help it. "I think you mean it."

"I do," Casson said.

Visions of glory danced in Martin's head. All these years of struggle, and a victory at the end of them? It seemed too good to be true. Of course, things that seemed too good to be true commonly were. "What's the catch?" he asked bluntly, and waited to hear what sort of smooth bushwah Harry T. Casson could spin.

"Look around," Casson said. "Plenty of people I'm hiring"-he meant scabs-"are going to go into the Army. Plenty of your people will, too. That's already started to happen. And a lot of the others will start working in munitions plants. Those will pay better than I've been. If I'm going to have to pay high to keep things going, I don't want to stay in a scrap with you people, too. That just adds insult to injury. So-how about it?"

Chester considered. Try as he would, he couldn't see a whole lot of bushwah there. What Harry T. Casson said made good, hard sense from a business point of view. Martin said, "Make your offer. We'll vote on it. If it's something we can live with, we'll vote for it. I just wish to God you'd said something like this a long time ago."

The building magnate shrugged. "I had no reason to. I made more money without you people than I would have with you. Now it looks like things are different. I hope I'm not stupid. I can see which way the wind is blowing."

It all came down to dollars and cents for him-his dollars and cents. How his workers got by? If they got by? He didn't care about that. It wasn't his worry, or he didn't see it as such. Capitalist, Chester thought, but then, Now the wind's blowing in our direction.

"I think we can work together," he said. "You're right about one thing: it's high time we tried." He put out his hand now. Harry T. Casson took it.

For a long time, Cincinnatus Driver had thought of himself as a lucky man. He'd been in Covington, Kentucky, when it passed from the CSA to the USA at the start of the Great War. Escaping the Confederate States was a good start on luck all by itself for a black man.

Then he'd got out of Kentucky. Escaping what had been the Confederate States was good luck for a black man, too. Negroes didn't have it easy in Des Moines, but they had it a lot easier. His son had graduated from high school-and married a Chinese girl. Achilles and Grace seemed happy enough, so he supposed that was luck… and he loved his grandchildren. Amanda, his daughter, was going to graduate, too. When Cincinnatus was a boy in Covington, any schooling for Negroes had been against the law.

He'd built up a pretty fair trucking business in Des Moines. That wasn't luck. That was hard work, nothing else but. But his father and mother had stayed behind in Covington. His mother began to slip into her second childhood. When Al Smith agreed to the plebiscite in Kentucky, Cincinnatus knew he would have to get his folks up to Des Moines. The Confederates would win that vote, and he didn't want two people who were born as slaves to go back under the Stars and Bars, especially not with Jake Featherston running the CSA.

And so he'd come back to Covington to help his father bring his mother out of Kentucky and back to Iowa… and his luck had run out. His mother, senile, had wandered away from home, as she was doing more and more often. He and his father went after her. Cincinnatus found her. He ran across the street to get her-and never saw the motorcar that hit him.

Fractured leg. Fractured skull. Everybody said he was lucky to be alive. He wasn't sure he called it luck. He'd been laid up when the plebiscite went off. He'd been laid up during the grace period afterwards, when people who wanted to stay in the USA could cross the Ohio. By the time he could travel at all, the USA had sealed the border. Now he was trapped in the Confederate States with a war on. If this wasn't hell, you could see it from here.

He still limped. A stick helped, but only so much. He got blinding headaches every now and again, or a little more often than every now and again. Worse than any of that were the reflexes he had to learn all over again, the things he'd put aside in almost twenty years in Iowa. There, he was a man among men-oh, not a man at the top of the heap, but a man nonetheless.

Here, he was a nigger.

Whenever he left Covington's colored district near the Licking River for any reason, he had to expect a cop to bear down on him and growl, "Let me see your passbook, boy." It didn't matter if the cop was only half his age. Negro males in the CSA went straight from boy to uncle. They were never misters, never men.

The cop this particular day had a white mustache and a limp almost as bad as Cincinnatus'. He wouldn't be any good in the army chewing north through Ohio and Indiana. He also had a gray uniform, an enameled Freedom Party flag pinned next to his badge, and the sour look of a man who was feeling a couple too many from the night before. He could be mean just for the fun of being mean.

"Here you are, suh," Cincinnatus said. His passbook looked official. It wasn't. Before he left Covington, he'd had connections with both the Red Negro underground and the Confederate diehards who'd resisted Kentucky's incorporation into the USA. He hadn't much wanted those connections, but he'd had them. Some of the Reds were still around-and still Red. False papers weren't too hard for them.

The policeman looked at the photo in the passbook and compared it to Cincinnatus' face. That was all right. The photo really was his. "Go on," the cop said grudgingly, handing back the passbook. "Don't you get in no trouble, now."

"Don't want no trouble, suh," Cincinnatus said, which was true. He put the passbook in his pocket, then gestured with his cane. "Couldn't get in no trouble even if I did want to."

"I never yet knew a nigger who couldn't get in trouble if he wanted to," the policeman said. But then he walked on by, adding, "You get your ass back into your own part of town pretty damn quick, you hear?"

"Oh, yes, suh," Cincinnatus said. "I hear you real good."

Newsboys hawked papers, shouting of Confederate victories all along the border with the USA. By what Cincinnatus gathered from U.S. wireless stations, the headlines in the Confederate papers weren't lying too much, however badly he wished they were. Since the war started, tuning in to the wireless had become an iffy business. It was suddenly against the law to listen to U.S. stations. The Confederates tried to back that up by jamming a lot of them. The USA fought back in kind against Confederate broadcasts. What you mostly heard these days was faint but urgent gabbling through roaring waterfalls of static.

With the cynicism black men learned early, Cincinnatus figured both sides would soon be lying just as hard as they could.

Antiaircraft guns poked their snouts up from parks and vacant lots. Some had camouflage netting draped over them in case U.S. airplanes came over in the daytime. Others didn't bother, but just stood there in their bare deadliness. So far, U.S. bombers had paid a couple of brief calls on Covington by night. They'd cost people some sleep, but they hadn't hit anything worth hitting.

Here was the grocery store he needed to visit. He had to wait a while to get noticed. The man behind the counter dealt with white customers till he didn't happen to have any in the store. Then he deigned to pay attention to Cincinnatus. "What do you want?" he asked. He didn't say, What can I do for you? the way he had for his white customers. Not many whites in the CSA thought about what they could do for Negroes.

"I need a gallon of ketchup for the barbecue place," Cincinnatus answered.

"Oh, you do, do you?" The white man paid some real attention to him for the first time. "Heinz or Del Monte?"

"Del Monte, suh. It's the best." Cincinnatus knew he sounded like a wireless advertisement, but he couldn't help it.

The clerk eyed him for a long moment. Then he said, "Hang on. I have to get it from the back room." He disappeared, returning a moment later with a carton that prominently featured the gold-bordered red Del Monte emblem. He set it on the counter. "Jug's inside. Thirty-six cents." Cincinnatus gave him a half-dollar, got his change, and stuck it in his pocket. The white man asked, "You carry that all right with the cane? You don't want to drop it, now."

Cincinnatus believed him. "I'll be careful," he promised. He tucked the carton under his free arm, then left the grocery and made his slow way back toward the Negro district. The policeman who'd asked him for his passbook saw him again. Since he was walking east, the cop didn't trouble him any more. As long as you know your place and stay there, you're all right. The white man didn't say it, but he might as well have.

Don't trip. Don't fall down. Cincinnatus was listening to what he himself wasn't saying as well as to what the cop wasn't. Got to pay for my passbook some kind o' way. I fall down, though, I pay too much.

Even before he got back into the colored part of town, his nostrils twitched. The breeze was out of the east, and brought the sweet, spicy, mouth-watering smell of barbecue to his nostrils. First Apicius Wood and then his son, Lucullus, had presided over what locals had long insisted was the best barbecue place between the Carolinas and Kansas City. The Woods, over the years, had had just about as many white customers as black. Freedom Party stalwarts weren't ashamed to get Lucullus' barbecue sauce all over their faces as they gnawed on falling-off-the-bone tender pork or beef ribs. They might despise Lucullus Wood. Nobody but a maniacal vegetarian could despise those ribs.

And the smell just got stronger and more tempting as Cincinnatus came closer. Walking inside was another jolt, because the Woods cooked indoors. It was like walking into hell, though Cincinnatus didn't think the sinners on the fire there would smell anywhere near so tasty. Carcasses spun on spits over pits of prime hickory wood. Back after the USA took Kentucky away from the CSA, Apicius had chosen his surname from that wood.

Assistant cooks didn't just keep the spits and carcasses going round and round. They also used long-handled brushes to slather on the spicy sauce that made the barbecue something more than mere roast meat. Fat and juices and sauce dripped down onto the red-hot coals, where they hissed and popped and flamed.

Coming in here on a dubious errand took Cincinnatus back in time. How often had he done that during and just after the Great War? Back then, he'd been whole and strong and young, so goddamn young. Now the years lay on his shoulders like sacks of cement. His body was healing, but it was a long way from healed. That fellow in the auto had almost done for him. But it had been his own fault, no one else's. He'd run out in the street, though he still didn't remember doing it, or actually getting hit. The pain when he came back to himself afterwards? That he remembered all too well.

One of the cooks pointed with a basting brush. Cincinnatus nodded. He already knew the way back to the office that had been Apicius' and now belonged to Lucullus. He'd been going there longer than that pimply high-yellow kid had been alive. He set down the box and knocked on the door. There had been times when he barged in there without knocking. He'd got away with it, but he wondered how.

"Yeah?" came the deep, gruff voice from the other side of the door. Cincinnatus opened it. Lucullus' scowl disappeared when he came in. "Oh. Sorry, friend. Thought you might be somebody else. Set yourself down. Here. Have some of this." He reached into his battered desk, pulled out a bottle, and offered it to Cincinnatus.

"Thank you kindly." Before taking the bottle, Cincinnatus carefully lifted the Del Monte carton and set it on the desk. "This here's for you. Ofay who gave it to me said not to drop it."

Lucullus Wood rumbled laughter. His father had been unabashedly fat. He was big and solid and heavy, but too hard for the word fat quite to fit him. He said, "I didn't aim to do that anyways. I know what's in there."

"Suits me. Reckoned I better speak up, though, just in case." Now Cincinnatus picked up the bottle and tilted it back. The whiskey wasn't very good, but it was strong. It went down his throat hot and snarling. "Do Jesus!" he wheezed. "That hit the spot."

"Good. Glad to hear it." Lucullus' Adam's apple worked as he took a formidable knock of hooch himself. He said, "Part of me's sorry you stuck here with your folks, Cincinnatus, but you got to answer me somethin', and answer it for true. Ain't it better to give them Confederate sons of bitches one right in the teeth than it is to sit up North somewheres and make like everything's fine?"

Cincinnatus owed Lucullus for his passbook, so he didn't laugh in his face. He said, "Mebbe," and let it go at that. But he would have given anything he had, including his soul for the Devil to roast in a barbecue pit, to be back in Des Moines with his family again.

Hot, humid summer weather was always a torment to Brigadier General Abner Dowling. An unkind soul had once said he was built like a rolltop desk. That held an unpleasant amount of truth. And now, after long years as General George Custer's adjutant, after an even longer stretch as occupation commander in Salt Lake City, after the infuriating humiliation of being kept in that position during the Pacific War against Japan, he finally had a combat command of his own.

He had it, and he could feel it going wrong, feel the ground shifting under his feet as if he were stumbling into quicksand. When the fighting broke out, he'd worried that his headquarters in Columbus was too far behind what would be the front. Now he worried that it was too far forward. He also worried about holding on to Columbus, and if that wasn't bad news, he couldn't imagine what would be.

Chillicothe was gone. Dowling hadn't expected to keep the former state capital forever. He hadn't expected to lose it in the first few days of fighting, either. He'd had several defense lines prepared between the Ohio and Chillicothe. He had only one between Chillicothe and Columbus. He was likely to lose the present state capital almost as fast as he'd lost the earlier one.

Of course, how much good his defense lines had done him was very much an open question. The Confederates had pierced them, one after another, with what seemed effortless ease. A few local counterattacks had bothered the men in butternut, but nothing seemed to slow them down for long. They kept coming: barrels and airplanes to punch holes in U.S. positions, foot soldiers and artillery to follow up and take out whatever the faster-moving stuff had left behind. It was a simple formula, but it had worked again and again.

The window in Dowling's office was open, to give a little relief from the heat. Masking tape crisscrossed the windowpane. If a bomb or a shell burst nearby, that would keep flying glass splinters from being quite so bad. The open window also let him hear a low rumble off to the south, a rumble like a distant thunderstorm. But it wasn't a thunderstorm, or not a natural one, anyhow. It was the noise of the approaching front.

It was also only background noise. What he heard in the foreground was a horrible cacophony of military transport and raw panic. Trucks full of soldiers and barrels were trying to push south, to get into position to hold back the Confederate flood. They needed to move quickly, and they were having a hard time moving at all. The whole population of southern Ohio seemed to be fleeing north as fast as it could go.

Dowling had trouble blaming the people running for their lives. If he were a farmer or a hardware-store owner and somebody started shooting off cannon and dropping bombs all around him, he would have got the hell out of there, too. But refugees were playing merry hell with troop movements. And Confederate fighters and light bombers had taken to tearing up refugee columns whenever they got the chance. That spread panic farther and wider than ever. It also coagulated road traffic even worse than simple flight could.

A knock on the door interrupted Dowling's gloomy reflections. A lieutenant stuck his head into the office and said, "Excuse me, sir, but Colonel Morrell is here to confer with you."

"Send him in," Dowling said. Morrell still wore a barrel man's coveralls. Grime and grease stains spotted them. Dowling heaved his bulk up out of the chair. "Good morning, Colonel. Good to see you."

"I wish I were back at the front," Irving Morrell said. "We've got to do something about those bastards, got to slow them down some kind of way. Can you get me more barrels? That's what we need most of all, dammit."

"I've been screaming into the telephone," Dowling answered. "They say they need them back East. They can't leave Washington and Philadelphia uncovered."

Morrell's suggestion about what the U.S. War Department could do with Washington and Philadelphia was illegal, immoral, improbable, and incandescent. "Is the General Staff deaf, dumb, and blind?" he demanded. "We're liable to lose the war out here before those people wake up enough to take their heads out of their-"

"I know," Dowling broke in, as soothingly as he could. "I'm doing my best to get them to listen to me, but…" He spread pink, pudgy hands.

"The Confederate attack is coming in on the line I predicted before the balloon went up," Morrell said bitterly. "Fat lot of good anticipation does if we haven't got the ways and means to meet it."

"I've heard good things about the action you fought east of Chillicothe," Dowling said. "You did everything you could."

"Yes? And so?" Morrell, Dowling rediscovered, had extraordinary eyes. A blue two shades lighter than the sky, they seemed to see farther than most men's. And, at the moment, they were remarkably cold. "They don't pay off for that, sir. They pay off for throwing the bastards back, and I didn't do it. I couldn't do it."

"You've done more than anybody else has," Dowling said.

"It's not enough." Nothing less than victory satisfied Irving Morrell. "If I'd had more to work with, I'd have done better. And if pigs had wings, we'd all carry umbrellas. If Featherston had held off a little longer, we'd have been in better shape. Every day would have helped us. Every-"

He broke off then, because the air-raid sirens started to howl. Some of the wireless-ranging stations along the border had had to be destroyed to keep them from falling into Confederate hands. That cut down the warning time Columbus got. Dowling rose from his chair. "Shall we go to the basement?" he said.

"I'd rather watch the show," Morrell said.

"Let me put it another way: go to the basement, Colonel. That's an order," Dowling said. "The country would probably muddle along without me well enough. It really needs you."

For a moment, he thought he would have a mutiny on his hands. Then Morrell nodded and flipped him as ironic a salute as he'd ever had. They went down to the basement together. Bombs were already falling by the time they got there. The noise was impressive.

Safety, here, was a relative thing. They weren't risking splinter and blast damage, the way they would have if they'd stayed in Dowling's office. But a direct hit could bring down the whole building and entomb them here. Buried alive… except they wouldn't stay alive very long.

Antiaircraft guns started hammering. Someone in the crowded cellar said, "I hope they knock a lot of those shitheads out of the sky."

Dowling hoped the same thing. But antiaircraft fire, no matter how ferocious, couldn't stop bombers. All it could do, at best, was make raids expensive. The Confederates had already proved they didn't mind paying the bill.

Bomb bursts walked closer to the building. After each one, the floor shook more under Dowling's feet. A captain a few feet away from him started screaming. Some men simply couldn't stand the strain. A scuffle followed. Finally, somebody clipped the captain, and he shut up.

"Thank God," Dowling said. "A little more of that, and I'd've started howling like a damn banshee, too."

Colonel Morrell nodded. "It really can be catching," he remarked, and rubbed the knuckles of his right hand against his trouser leg. Had he been the one who'd laid out the captain? He'd been in the brawl, but Dowling hadn't seen him land the punch.

The stick of bombs passed over the headquarters building. Dowling thought of the Angel of Death, and wondered if someone had slapped lamb's blood on the doorframe at the entrance. The bursts diminished in force as they got farther away.

"Whew," somebody said, which summed it up as well as anything else.

"Columbus is catching hell, though," someone else said. "Too goddamn bad. This is a nice town."

"Too goddamn bad is right," Morrell said. "This is a town we've got to hold." He plainly didn't care whether Columbus was nice, dreary, or actively vile. All he cared about was Columbus as a military position.

After about half an hour, the all-clear sounded. Confederate air bases weren't very far away. The bombers could loiter for a while if U.S. fighters didn't rise to drive them off. That didn't seem to have happened this time. Of course, the C.S. bombers would have had fighters of their own riding shotgun.

"Well," Dowling said in what he hoped wasn't black despair, "let's see what they've done to us this time."

He and Morrell and the rest of the officers and enlisted men climbed the stairs out of the basement. A corporal looked up and said, "Jesus God, but it's good to see the sky again!" He crossed himself.

Dowling was more than happy to see the sky again, too, even if clouds and streamers of smoke and the contrails left by airplanes now departed still marred its blue perfection like burn scars on what would have been a beautiful face. A staff officer pointed to a tall pillar of smoke off to the west and said, "They've gone and pasted Camp Custer again, the sons of bitches."

"No big surprise there," Dowling said. The Confederates had been hitting the training facility every chance they got ever since the war broke out. It was, without a doubt, a legitimate military target. But they were also punishing civilian sectors of Columbus and other U.S. cities. In retaliation-President Smith said it was in retaliation-the United States were visiting the same sort of destruction on C.S. towns.

Colonel Morrell was thinking along the same lines. "Going to be a swell old war, isn't it?" he said to nobody in particular.

The air-raid sirens started up again, not the usual shrill warble but one that got louder and softer, louder and softer, over and over again till back-teeth fillings started to ache. "What the hell?" Dowling said.

Everybody stared for five or ten seconds, trying to remember what that signal was supposed to mean. At last, a sergeant exclaimed, "It's a goddamn gas alert!"

There was a new wrinkle. The Confederates hadn't dropped that kind of death from the air before, at least not on Columbus. The soldiers dashed back into the building they'd so gratefully vacated moments before. Some of them found gas masks. Others had to take their chances without.

From behind his hot, heavy rubber monstrosity, Dowling said, "This is going to be hell on civilians. They don't have anywhere near enough masks." Even he could hear how muffled his voice was.

Morrell wore a mask, too. He did so self-consciously, as if he didn't want to but knew he had to. He said, "The Confederates only need to drop a few gas bombs, too, to make us flabble all over the place. You can't help taking gas seriously, and they get a big payback for a small investment."

"So they do," Dowling said morosely. "But I'll tell you this, Colonel: they won't be the only ones for long."