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X

The worst had happened. That was what everybody said. The Confederates had sliced up through Ohio and cut the United States in half. If the worst had already happened, shouldn't that have meant that men from the USA and CSA weren't killing one another quite so often now? It didn't, not so far as Dr. Leonard O'Doull could tell.

U.S. forces were trying to strike back toward the west and cut through the Confederate corridor. The Confederates, for their part, were doing their best to push eastward, toward Pennsylvania. So far, nobody seemed to be making much progress. That didn't mean an awful lot of young men on both sides weren't getting maimed, though.

O'Doull's aid station lay a few miles west of Elyria, Ohio-about halfway between lost Sandusky and Cleveland. Elyria had been the town with the largest elm in Ohio: a tree with a spread of branches of over a hundred thirty feet and a trunk almost sixty-five feet thick. It had been, but no more: Confederate artillery and bombs had reduced the tree to kindling-along with much of what had been a pleasant little place.

"Burns are the worst," O'Doull said to Granville McDougald. "Some of the poor bastards with burns, you just want to cut their throats and do them a favor."

"This tannic acid treatment we're using now helps a lot," the corpsman answered. McDougald was resolutely optimistic.

"We're saving people we wouldn't have in the last war-no doubt of that," O'Doull said. "Some of them, though… Are we doing them any favors when we keep them alive?"

"We've got to do what we can," McDougald said. "Once they get the pain under control, they thank us."

"Yeah. Once," O'Doull said tightly. He was seeing a lot more burn cases this time around than he had in the last war. Men who bailed out of barrels usually had to run a gauntlet of flame to escape. During the Great War, barrels had been latecomers and oddities. They were an ordinary part of the fighting here. With so many more of them in action, so many more horrible things could happen to their crews.

In the last war, O'Doull didn't remember anyone asking to be killed so he could escape his torment. It might well have happened, but he hadn't seen it. He did now. More than once, he'd been tempted to ignore the Hippocratic oath he'd sworn and give the victims what they wanted.

"That's why God made morphine, sir," McDougald said.

"God made morphine-and we make addicts," O'Doull replied.

"If you're in pain, that's the least of your worries," the corpsman said. "All you want to do is stop hurting. You can get over morphine addiction once you're not hurting any more. As long as the burns are giving you hell, you might as well be dead."

O'Doull thought of addiction as a personal failing, even if pain relief caused it. He eyed McDougald thoughtfully. The corpsman had a different slant on things. "You look at it from the patient's point of view, don't you? Not the doctor's, I mean."

"I'm not a doctor," McDougald said, which was formally true. He went on, "And we're here for the patients, aren't we?"

A lot of people at aid stations thought they were there to advance their own careers, or to stay out of the front-line fighting. And there were some men from churches that did not approve of members who carried guns, but that had nothing against helping the wounded. "Everybody ought to think the way you do," O'Doull said. "We'd all be better off."

The corpsman only shrugged. "Maybe yes, maybe no. My guess is, we'd just be screwed up a different way."

"Doc! Hey, Doc!" O'Doull had come to dread that call. It meant another wounded man coming in. Sure enough, the corpsman outside went on, "Got a belly wound for you, Doc!"

"Oh, hell," O'Doull said. Even with sulfa drugs, belly wounds were always bad news. The chance for peritonitis was very high, and a bullet or shell fragment could destroy a lot of organs a person simply couldn't live without. O'Doull raised his voice: "Bring him in."

The corpsmen were already doing it. They lifted their stretcher up onto the makeshift operating table that had been someone's kitchen table till the Medical Corps commandeered it. The soldier on the stretcher wasn't groaning or screaming, as men with belly wounds often did. He'd passed out-a mercy for a man with an injury like that. He was ghost pale, and getting paler as O'Doull eyed him.

"I don't think you'd better wait around real long, Doc," said the corpsman who'd shouted for O'Doull.

"I don't intend to, Eddie," O'Doull answered. He turned to McDougald. "Pass gas for me, Granny?" McDougald wasn't an anesthetist, either, but he'd do a tolerable job.

He nodded now. "I'll take a shot at it." He grabbed the ether cone and put it over the unconscious man's face. "Have to be careful not to give him too much, or he's liable to quit breathing for good."

He was liable to do that anyway. He looked like the devil. But he was still alive, and O'Doull knew he had to give it his best shot. He said, "Eddie, get a plasma line into his arm. We're going to have to stretch his blood as far as it'll go, and then maybe another ten feet after that."

"Right, Doc." Eddie grabbed for a needle. O'Doull hoped it wasn't one he'd just used on some other patient, but he wasn't going to get himself in an uproar about it one way or the other. This wounded man had more important things to worry about. Surviving the next half hour topped the list.

When O'Doull opened him up, he grimaced at the damage. The bullet had gone in one side and out the other, and had tumbled on the way through. There were more bleeders than you could shake a stick at, and they were all leaking like hell.

Granville McDougald said, "You don't want to waste a lot of time, Doc. He's just barely here."

"What's his blood pressure, Eddie?" O'Doull asked. His hands automatically started repairing the worst of the damage.

"Let me get a cuff on him," the corpsman said. "It's… ninety over sixty, sir, and falling. We're losing him. Down to eighty over fifty… Shit! He's got no pulse."

"Not breathing," McDougald said a moment later, and then, "I'm afraid he's gone."

Eddie nodded. "No pulse. No BP. No nothin'." He loosened the cuff and pulled the needle from the plasma line out of the soldier's-the dead soldier's-arm. "Not your fault, Doc. You did what you could. He got hit too bad, that's all. I saw what you were trying to fix up. His guts were all chewed to hell."

"That they were." Leonard O'Doull straightened wearily. "Get his identity disk. Then call the burial detail and Graves Registration. Somebody's going to have to notify his next of kin."

"That's a bastard of a job," McDougald said. "In the last war, no one wanted to see a Western Union messenger coming to the door. Everybody was afraid he had a, 'deeply regret' telegram. It's gonna be the same story this time around, too."

O'Doull hadn't thought spending the last war in a military hospital had shielded him from anything. Now he discovered he was wrong. People in Quebec hadn't had to worry about telegrams with bad news-not in the part of Quebec where he'd been stationed, anyhow. Farther west, Quebec City and Montreal had held out for a long time before falling. Francophones had defended them along with English-speaking Canadians.

Lucien doesn't have to worry about the war. He can get on with his life. That was a relief, anyhow. Quebec's conscription law wasn't universal, and Lucien had never had to be a soldier. And with the Republic formally neutral-even if it did lean toward the USA and help occupy English-speaking Canada-it wasn't likely the younger O'Doull would ever have to aim a rifle in anger.

That bothered the elder O'Doull not at all. He'd seen too much of what rifles aimed in anger could do in the last war. The refresher course he was getting now-including the poor son of a bitch who'd just died on the table-had done nothing to change his opinion.

He discovered he was still holding the scalpel. He chucked it into a wide-mouthed jug of rubbing alcohol. The jug had a big red skull and crossbones on it, plus a warning label in red capital letters: poison! do not drink! He hoped that would keep thirsty soldiers from experimenting. You never could tell. He'd heard that sailors were draining the alcohol fuel from torpedo motors and drinking it. But that really was ethyl alcohol, and wouldn't hurt them unless they were pigs. Rubbing alcohol was a different critter. It was poison even in small doses.

He scrubbed his hands with strong soap. He could get the dead soldier's blood off of them easily enough. Getting it off his mind…? He shook his head. That was another story. If anybody could sympathize with Lady Macbeth, a battlefield surgeon was the one to do it. Here's the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. And Macbeth himself:

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No, this hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red.

Macbeth, unlike his lady, had borne up under what he'd done. O'Doull had to do the same.

"Can't save them all, Doc," Eddie said.

It was meant to be sympathy. O'Doull knew as much. He wanted to punch the corpsman even so. Instead, he hurried out of the tent. He gaped and blinked in the sunshine like some nocturnal creature unexpectedly caught out by day. That wasn't so far wrong. He spent most of his time under canvas trying to patch up what the fierce young men on either side were so eager to ruin.

For the time being, the front was pretty quiet. The Confederates had got what they wanted most. The United States hadn't yet decided how their real counterattack would go in. Only an occasional shot or brief burst of gunfire marred the day.

O'Doull pulled out a pack of Raleighs. They were spoil of war: taken from a dead Confederate soldier and passed on to him in appreciation of services rendered. The C.S. tobacco was a hell of a lot smoother than what the USA grew. Even since he'd got to the front, O'Doull had noticed a steep dive in the quality of U.S. cigarettes as stocks of imported tobacco got used up. These days, brands like Rose Bowl and Big Sky tasted as if they were made of dried, chopped horse manure.

He still smoked them when he couldn't get anything better. They relaxed him and calmed his nerves even if they did taste lousy. Most of the time, his hands steadied down when he got to work. Still, a dose of nicotine didn't hurt.

Raleighs, now, Raleighs had it all. They gave your nerves what you craved, and they tasted good, too. How could you go wrong?

O'Doull stopped with the half-smoked cigarette halfway to his mouth. How could you go wrong? He wouldn't have been enjoying this savory smoke if some kid from North Carolina or Mississippi or Texas hadn't stopped a bullet or a shell fragment. Things had gone wrong for the Confederate soldier, and they'd never go right for him again. O'Doull started to throw down the cigarette, then checked himself. What was the point of that? It wouldn't do the dead man any good. But the smoke didn't taste as good now when he raised it to his lips.

He finished the Raleigh, then stomped it out. Behind the line, U.S. guns began to roar. Shells flew through the air with freight-train noises. Gas rounds gurgled as if they were tank cars full of oil or molasses. O'Doull's mouth twisted. The Confederates would respond in kind, of course. Each side always did when the other used gas.

"Different kinds of casualties," he muttered. "Happy goddamn day." He ducked back into the tent to get ready for them.

They put Armstrong Grimes' company into two boxcars. It wasn't quite the 8 HORSES or 40 MEN arrangement the French had used during the Great War-Armstrong didn't think the cars had housed horses or cattle or anything similarly appetizing. But he did come to feel a strong and comradely relation with a sardine. The only difference was, they hadn't poured olive oil in after his buddies and him. Maybe they should have. The grease might have kept the men from rubbing together so much. Just getting back to the honey buckets was trial enough.

"How come we're so lucky?" he grumbled.

"Can't you figure it out for yourself?" Corporal Stowe asked. "I thought you were a smart fellow. You graduated high school and you stayed alive, right? That's why you made PFC."

Armstrong was convinced simply staying alive had more to do with the stripe on his sleeve than the high-school diploma did. He had that more because his old man would have walloped the snot out of him if he'd quit beforehand than for any other reason. Yeah, only about one guy in three in the USA did, but so what? It didn't mean anything to him.

He said, "Maybe I'm a moron especially for today, but I don't see what you're driving at."

"No, huh?" The grin the corporal sent his way wasn't especially friendly or amused. "All right-I'll spell it out for you. We're going where we're going on account of we ended up west of fucking Sandusky when the Confederates cut the country in half. If we'd been east of the goddamn place, they'd've done something different to us-I mean, with us."

"Oh." Armstrong Grimes thought it over. It made more sense than he wished it did. Getting from, say, Cleveland to Utah would have been hard, long, and dangerous. Getting from western Ohio to Mormon country was a straight shot-except, with luck, nobody would be shooting at them till they got there. He nodded. "Yeah, I guess maybe you're right."

"Bet your ass I am." Stowe's laugh was the laugh of a man waiting for the gallows the next morning. "I'll tell you something else, too: I'd sooner fight Featherston's fuckers than the damned Mormons. The Confederates play by the rules, pretty much. The Mormons, it's you or them, and they don't quit till they're dead."

"How do you know that?" Grimes asked.

"That's how it was in the last war, anyway," Stowe answered. "Men, women, kids-they threw everything at us but the kitchen sink. And they probably loaded that full of TNT and left it for a booby trap."

"Oh, boy," Armstrong said in a hollow voice. His father hadn't fought in Utah, and so he'd never had much to say about the Mormons. History books in school made them out to be bad guys, but didn't talk about them a whole lot. The books seemed to take the attitude that if you didn't look at them, they'd go away. All he knew about them was that they wanted to have lots of wives and they hated the U.S. government. The wives didn't seem to matter. Hating the U.S. government did.

The train rattled west. Every so often, it would stop at a siding. They'd open the doors to the boxcars and let the soldiers out to stretch. The country gradually got flatter and drier. They clattered over the Mississippi between Quincy, Illinois, and Hannibal, Missouri. The bridge had a nest of antiaircraft guns around it. Armstrong doubted they would have done much good had Confederate bombers come calling.

Missouri gave way to Kansas. Armstrong discovered why they called them the Great Plains. Nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles. Western Colorado was the same way. But then, in the distance, the Rockies poked their way up over the horizon. Those were mountains. Nothing Armstrong had ever seen in the eastern part of the USA prepared him for country like that.

The next day, the train went over them. Even the passes were high enough to make his breath come short. He was glad he didn't have to do anything serious there. The train went down the other side, but not so far down.

It stopped again in Grand Junction, Colorado, where the Gunnison and Colorado Rivers came together. Again, Armstrong was glad to get out and stretch. A sign on the train station said, biggest town in colorado west of the rockies. That might have been true, but it didn't strike him as worth bragging about. If Grand Junction had ten thousand people, that was pushing things. It was full of frame houses, most of them painted white. Not far from the railroad yards, several factories and packing plants dominated the business district.

Railroad workers hooked up a car full of coal and scrap iron in front of the locomotive. Pointing, Armstrong asked, "What the hell's going on there?"

Corporal Stowe laughed. Again, the sound didn't hold a whole lot of mirth. "Goddamn Mormons are mining the train tracks. Better if they blow up a car full of junk than an engine with people in it."

"Oh." Armstrong thought that over. "Yeah, I guess so." He eyed the forward car. "Bastards really are playing for keeps, aren't they?"

"I said so before. You better believe it," Stowe answered. Behind them, somebody blew a whistle. The noncom grimaced. "Time to get back in."

"Mooo!" Armstrong said mournfully. Stowe laughed once more, this time as if he really meant it.

Armstrong couldn't have said for sure when they crossed from Colorado into Utah. The train went at a crawl all the way. If that warning car did touch off a mine, the engineer wanted the damage to be as limited as possible. He was probably thinking more of his own neck than of his passengers'. Armstrong didn't mind. He was in no great hurry to meet the Mormons.

Nothing blew up in the trip across the rebellious state, for which he was duly grateful. The train stopped at a place called Woodside. Soldiers threw the doors to the cars open. "Out!" they yelled. "Out! Out! Out! This here's the end of the line."

"Jesus!" Armstrong said when he got a look around. "It sure as hell looks like the end of the line."

Grand Junction had been a small city. Woodside, Utah, was barely a wide place in the road. Along with a railroad depot, it boasted two gas stations and, between them, a trickle of water that had a sign above it: WOODSIDE GEYSER. DO NOT DRINK.

Armstrong jerked a thumb toward the sign. "What the hell's that?"

"Bad water, that's what," answered one of the men who looked to have been there for a while. "Railroad dug for water back around the turn of the century and got a gusher they couldn't cap. Only trouble was, it was bad water. People couldn't drink it. Cows kept trying-and kept dying. Ain't much of a geyser now, but from what the old-timers say it really used to be something."

"Oh, boy." Armstrong tried to imagine what being an old-timer in Woodside, Utah, would be like. If you had a chance between living here for fifty or sixty years and blowing out your brains, wouldn't you think hard about picking up a rifle?

But even the old-timers had probably never seen Woodside the way it was now. Green-gray tents spread out in all directions. For reasons known only to itself and possibly to God, the Army had decided to make this miserable place its chief staging area for moves against the Mormon rebels farther west. The rebels were holding the parts of Utah worth hanging on to. They seemed perfectly willing to let the Army have the rest.

Off in the distance, artillery muttered and growled. Armstrong was more familiar with that noise than he wished he were. He wasn't sorry to hear it at a distance, though. He'd heard artillery at much closer ranges than this. He'd heard soldiers after shells landed among them, too. He shoved that thought out of his mind. He didn't want to remember what happened when things went wrong.

For the rest of that day, things went right. He and his buddies lined up for showers-presumably not in water from the Woodside Geyser. They lined up again for chow. They got steaks and french fries, the first meal that didn't come out of cans they'd had since leaving Ohio. It wasn't a great steak, but the only thing really wrong with it in Armstrong's eyes was that it was too damn small.

He slept on a real steel-framed cot with a real mattress that night. When first conscripted, he'd hated Army cots. They weren't a patch on his bed back home. Compared to the floor of a jouncing freight car, though, or to sleeping in a muddy foxhole, this one was a good approximation of heaven. He got rid of at least a few of the kinks of travel before reveille the next morning.

Breakfast was even better than supper had been. Bacon and real scrambled eggs, biscuits with gravy, fresh-brewed coffee… He ate till he was groaningly full. He wasn't the only one, either. The cooks had a devil of a time keeping ahead of the ravening hordes of hungry men.

Content with the world, Armstrong was slowly walking back to his tent when a metallic buzzing in the air made him look west. "What the hell's that?" he said.

"Looks like a crop-duster," another soldier said. The fabric-covered biplane certainly wasn't very impressive. Armstrong felt as if he could run as fast as it flew. He knew that wasn't so, but the impression remained.

A few men pointed at the biplane. More paid no attention to it at all as it sputtered along over the Army encampment at Woodside. Armstrong might have been the only one who saw a crate tumble out of it. He had time for no more than a startled, "What the-?" before the crate hit the ground.

Boom! The next thing Armstrong knew, he was on the ground. That wasn't the blast-it was reflex painfully acquired on the battlefield. When something blew up, you hit the dirt. You did if you wanted to keep breathing, anyhow.

A soldier off to his right didn't hit the dirt fast enough-and let out a startled squawk of pain. He pulled a tenpenny nail out of his arm. The nail was red and wet with his blood from point to head.

"Find an aid station," Armstrong said. "There's a Purple Heart for you."

The soldier just gaped at him. Ignoring the man, Armstrong jumped to his feet and ran toward the place where the makeshift bomb had gone off. The biplane, meanwhile, buzzed off in the direction from which it had come. Nobody took a shot at it. Very likely, only a handful of people had any idea it had dropped the improvised bomb.

Makeshift, improvised, or not, the bomb did everything its equivalent from a fancy ordnance factory might have done. It knocked things down. It blew things-and soldiers-up. It sprayed fragments of sharp metal (nails, here) all over the place. What more could you ask for from something that fell out of an airplane?

Armstrong tripped over a leg and almost fell. He gulped. Breakfast nearly came up. The rest of the man wasn't attached to the leg. A little closer to where the Mormons' explosive had hit, he found a soldier as neatly disemboweled as if he'd be cut up for butcher's meat in the next few minutes. Then he came upon someone he could actually help: a sergeant with a mangled hand trying without much luck to bandage himself with the other. Kneeling beside him, Armstrong said, "Here, let me do that."

"Thanks, kid," the noncom got out through clenched teeth. "What the hell happened?" Armstrong told him in a few words. The sergeant swore. "Ain't that a son of a bitch? Goddamn Mormons got bombers?"

"Looks that way." Armstrong stared west, then shook his head. "Who knows what else they've got, too?"

Brigadier General Abner Dowling rode a train east toward Philadelphia. The journey was one he would much rather not have made. He'd known it was coming, though. He hadn't been recalled by the War Department. That would have been bad enough. But instead, he'd been summoned by the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. That was at least ten times worse.

Congress had formed such a committee once before, during the War of Secession. It hadn't proved a good idea then. The committee had crucified officers it didn't like, and terrorized more than it crucified. It hadn't done a damn thing to keep the war from being lost. And now, just to prove how clever the elected rulers of the country were, they'd decided to reprise what hadn't worked before.

And, of course, Abner Dowling was the first, to say nothing of the most obvious, target the committee had chosen. People from Bangor to San Diego were going to be yelling, "Who lost Ohio?" They were going to be pointing fingers and shouting for heads. And there was Dowling, right square in the crosshairs. They didn't even need to look very hard.

If a Congressman can spot me, I must be obvious, Dowling thought savagely. He could make a good guess about what would happen when he got to the de facto capital. They were going to pin everything on him. They would say that, if the U.S. forces in Ohio had had a general who knew his ass from a hole in the ground, everything would have gone fine, and soldiers in green-gray would have chased those butternut bastards all the way down through Kentucky and into Tennessee, if not into Alabama and Mississippi.

They'd expect him to fall on his sword, too. What else could he do? He'd issued the orders-the orders that hadn't worked. If he'd issued some different orders, wouldn't things have turned out differently? Wouldn't they have turned out better?

Of course they would. That was how Congress, with its infinite wisdom and twenty-twenty hindsight, was bound to see things, anyhow.

"Oh, yes. Of course," Dowling muttered. The woman across the aisle from him gave him an odd look. He ignored her.

An hour out of Pittsburgh, the train slowed and then stopped. They hadn't come to a town, not even a whistlestop. They were out in the middle of nowhere, or as close to the middle of nowhere as you could get in a crowded state like Pennsylvania. A telegraph line ran next to the tracks. A big crow-a raven?-sat on the wire staring in through the window at Dowling. I'm not dead yet, he thought. Then he wished that last word hadn't occurred to him.

An important-looking man in an expensive suit and a dark homburg reached up and grabbed the cord that rang for the conductor. In due course, that blue-uniformed worthy appeared. "See here," the important-looking man said. "I demand to know what has happened to this train. I have an urgent engagement in the capital."

Dowling had an urgent engagement in the capital, too. He wasn't eager enough to make a fuss about it, though. As far as he was concerned, the train could sit there as long as it pleased. He glanced out at the big black bird on the wire. If we do wait a long time, you'll starve before I do.

The conductor was a tall, pale, skinny man who looked as if he'd been working on trains forever. "Well, I'll tell you," he said in a broad Down East accent. "Th' engineer calls it sabotage." He stretched out the final a till it seemed to last about a minute and a half.

"Sabotage!" Half a dozen people in the car echoed the word; all of them pronounced it much faster than the conductor had.

"Ayuh," he said. Dowling needed a moment to understand that meant yes. "Hole in the track up ahead. Hole in the ground up ahead. Damn big hole." He spoke with a certain dismal satisfaction.

"How long are we going to be stuck here?" the important-looking man asked. "My missing that meeting would be a disaster-a disaster, I tell you."

"Well, if you care to, you can walk." The conductor stretched that last a as far as he had the one in sabotage. The important-looking man glared furiously. Several other people snickered. That only made Mr. Urgent Meeting more unhappy. The conductor continued, "They got a crew workin' on it. Be another hour, hour and a half, I reckon."

Some passengers sighed. Some groaned. The important-looking man fumed. Dowling wondered just how much sabotage the Confederates were bringing off in the USA. Not as much as we are in the CSA, I hope. He also wondered how Lucullus Wood and the other stubborn blacks in Kentucky were doing. Maybe the Confederates would have hit Ohio even harder than they had if not for Negro sabotage. But they'd hit plenty hard enough as things were, dammit.

The promised hour to an hour and a half stretched out to closer to three. Dowling hadn't expected anything different. The crow or raven flew away. The important-looking man almost had a fit of apoplexy. Dowling almost hoped he would.

By the time the general got into Philadelphia, night had fallen. The train crawled in with blackout curtains over the windows and with no light on the engine. No one knew if Confederate bombers would come over; no one wanted to give them targets if they did. The station had black cloth awnings stretched over the platforms. Dim lights gathered arriving passengers through double curtains of black cloth into the more brightly lit interior.

"General Dowling?" The officer who waited inside was tall and lean and fair-pale, really-almost to the point of ghostliness. He wore eagles on his shoulder straps. His arm-of-service colors were the gold and black of the General Staff.

"Hello, Colonel Abell," Dowling said stiffly. Et tu, Brute? was what went through his mind. He had not got on well with General Staff officers since the days of the Great War. Part of that was guilt by association; he'd served with George Custer and Irving Morrell, both men who had little use for the stay-at-homes in Philadelphia and weren't shy about letting those stay-at-homes know it. And part of it was that Abner Dowling felt the same way. If John Abell and his fellow high foreheads were to help the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War ease Dowling out…

"We have a car waiting for you, sir," Abell said. "If you'll just come with me…"

"I have a suitcase," Dowling said.

"It will be taken care of," the bloodless General Staff officer promised. "That sort of thing, after all, is why God made enlisted men."

He led Dowling out to a Chevrolet with headlights reduced to slits. A dent in one fender said the little bit of light they threw hadn't always been enough. "Nice of you to meet me," Dowling said as they got in. The driver-an enlisted man-started up the engine and put the auto in gear.

Colonel Abell lit a cigarette and offered Dowling the pack. He leaned close to give Dowling a light. Then he smiled-a surprisingly charming smile from someone usually so cold. "Don't worry, General," he said, amusement-amusement? yes, definitely amusement-lurking in his voice. "Our interests here run in the same direction."

"Do they?" Dowling said. Had the General Staff officer told him the sun was shining, he would have gone to a window and checked.

Abell laughed. The noise was slightly rusty, as if from disuse, but unmistakable. "As a matter of fact, they do. You don't want the Joint Committee crucifying you for losing Ohio, and the War Department doesn't want the Joint Committee crucifying it for allowing Ohio to be lost."

"Ah," Dowling said. That did make sense. In the War of Secession, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War had run rampant over the Army. No wonder Colonel Abell and his superiors were anxious to avoid a repeat performance.

"Are you a quick study, General?" Abell asked.

"Tolerably," Dowling answered. Anyone who'd served under Custer had to be a quick study, to find ways to get his superior out of the trouble he insisted on getting himself into. "Why?"

"Listen to me for about twenty minutes. With things the way they are, getting you to BOQ will take that long anyhow." Colonel Abell proceeded to fill Dowling's head with the inadequacies of U.S. military budgets, starting in the early 1920s and continuing to the present day. Dowling found himself nodding again and again. Abell finished, "You know perfectly well we could have put up a much stronger defense in Ohio if we'd had more and better materiel. I want you to let the Joint Committee know, too."

"They won't want to hear it," Dowling said. "Congress never wants to hear that anything is its fault. But I will tell them. I'll be delighted to-and I thank you for the chapter and verse."

"My pleasure, sir," Abell said as the Chevrolet pulled up in front of Bachelor Officer Quarters.

"Not altogether, Colonel," Dowling said. "Not altogether."

His suitcase had beaten him there. He wondered how that had happened. He slept better than he'd thought he would, and it wasn't just because the Confederates didn't come over that night.

The next morning, as another noncom drove him to the hall where the Joint Committee met, he got a look at what the bombers had done to Philadelphia when they did come over. It wasn't pretty. On the other hand, he'd seen worse in Ohio. Oddly, that thought steadied him. When he got to the hall and was sworn in, his first interrogator was a white-maned Socialist Senator from Idaho, a state that might never have seen a real, live Confederate and surely had never seen a hostile one. "Well, General, to what besides your own incompetence do you ascribe our failures in Ohio?" the Senator brayed.

"Sir, I think one of our worst problems is the fact that Congress put so little money into the military after the end of the Great War," Dowling answered. "And when the Confederates did start loading up, we didn't try to match them as hard as we might have. As I recall, sir"-as Colonel Abell had briefed him-"you last voted for an increased military appropriation in 1928-or was it, '27?"

He'd heard about men standing with their mouths hanging open while nothing came out. He wasn't sure he'd ever seen it, not till that moment. The sight was sweeter than the sugar he'd spooned into his morning coffee. After close to half a minute, the Senator recovered enough to say, "How dare you blame this august body for your own dismal failings?"

"Sir, war's been staring us in the face ever since Jake Featherston got elected. That's almost eight years ago now," Dowling said. "Anyone could see it. Plenty of people did see it. Why was Congress so slow about giving us the money to build and develop the tools we need to lick the son of a bitch?"

More bellows and barks followed, but the Senator from Idaho seemed more than a little disconcerted by answers he hadn't expected. He acted relieved to turn the grilling over to a Congresswoman from New York City. Flora Blackford said, "Instead of snarling at each other, what can Congress and the Army do to work together and gain the victory we have to have?"

A sensible question! Dowling had wondered if he'd hear any. "Get all our factories humming," he answered. "Make sure the raw materials reach them. Make sure the weapons reach the front. Keep the Confederates as busy as we can-never let 'em relax. Uh, knock Utah flat. And while we're at it, get the niggers in the CSA plenty of guns, as many as we can. That'll make sure Featherston's boys stay hopping."

It went on and on. There was more hostility from the committee members, but also, increasingly, a wary respect. Dowling had no idea whether they were really listening to him or just posturing for the hometown papers. He also had no idea whether he was saving his career or sinking it forever. The strange thing was, he didn't care. And it was amazing how liberating that could be.

Jake Featherston looked at the engineer in his cramped, glassed-in booth. Saul Goldman was in there with the engineer. The little Jew didn't usually look over people's shoulders like that-he wasn't pushy, the way sheenies were supposed to be. But this was a big speech. Featherston was glad to see Goldman there. When something needed doing, the director of communications made sure he was on the spot.

The engineer pointed through the glass. Jake nodded. The light on the wall above the booth glowed red. He was on.

"I'm Jake Featherston," he said, "and I'm here to tell you the truth." How many times had he said that on the wireless? More than he could count, by now. While he was saying it, he believed it every single time, too. That was what let him make other people believe it right along with him.

"Truth is, we never wanted this here war with the United States. Truth is, they forced it on us when they wouldn't listen to our reasonable demands. Well, now they've paid the price for being stupid. They've got their country cut in half, and they've seen they can't hope to stand against us. Our cause is just and right, and that only makes us stronger.

"But I'm a reasonable man. I've always been a reasonable man. I want to show I don't hold a grudge. And so I'm going to offer terms to the USA, and I do believe they're terms so kind and generous that nobody could possibly say no to 'em.

"First off, as soon as the United States agree to 'em, we'll pull out of U.S. territory fast as we can. We didn't want Yankees on our soil in 1917, and we don't want to be on theirs now." He'd won, or come as close to winning as didn't matter to him. Now was the time to sound magnanimous. "All we want is what's rightfully ours. I'll tell you what I mean.

"At the end of the last war the USA took Sequoyah and chunks of Virginia and Sonora away from us. We want our country back. We've got a right to have our country back. And it's only fitting and proper for the United States to give back everything they took."

In the engineer's booth, Saul Goldman nodded vigorously. Saul was a good guy, as solid as they came. If he worried a little more than most Freedom Party men, well, what could you expect from a Jew? Plenty of Party men had all the balls in the world. Featherston knew he needed some with brains, too. Goldman fit the bill there.

"And it's only fitting and proper that the United States should pay back the reparations they squeezed out of us when we were down," Featherston went on. "Paying them killed our currency and damn near ruined us. There was a time when, instead of carrying your money to the store in your pocket and your groceries home in your basket, you needed the basket for your money and you could take home what you bought in your pocket. We don't ever want that to happen again."

He didn't mention that the United States had stopped demanding reparations after a Freedom Party man gunned down the Confederate President in Alabama. If Grady Calkins hadn't died in that park, Jake would have killed him. He would have stretched it out over days, maybe even weeks, to make sure Calkins suffered the way he should have. The assassin had come closer to murdering the Party than any of its enemies.

And if the United States came down with their own case of galloping inflation… If they did, wouldn't that just be too bad. Jake grinned wolfishly. Seeing the USA in trouble would break his heart, all right.

"We don't want to have to worry about Yankee aggression any more, either," he went on. "We don't mind if the United States keep their forts around Washington. That's all right. George Washington was the father of their country, too, even if he was a good Virginian. But except for those, we want a disarmed border. No more forts within a hundred miles of the frontier. No barrels within a hundred miles, either, or war airplanes. We will have the right to send inspectors into the USA to make sure the Yankees hold up their end of the bargain."

He didn't say anything about letting U.S. inspectors travel on the Confederate side of the border. There were good reasons why he didn't, chief among them that the only way he intended to let U.S. inspectors into the CSA was over his dead body. After the Great War, U.S. snoops had worn out their welcome in a hurry. He didn't intend to dismantle his fortifications, either, or to move back his fighters and bombers and armor. The United States had let down their guard after the Great War. He wasn't about to make the same mistake.

Saul Goldman had stopped nodding. He wore a frown. He wanted to make really easy terms with the USA. Featherston couldn't see that. He was on top, by God. What point to being on top if you didn't take advantage of it? And he needed to squeeze the United States while he was on top. They were bigger and richer and more populous than the Confederate States. He never forgot that. No Confederate leader could afford to forget it. However badly the Whigs had botched the Great War, it had proved the Yankees could be dangerous foes, not just a bunch of bumbling fools.

Featherston continued, "And both we and the United States have internal troubles we need to deal with. Unlike some countries I could name, we don't interfere in other nations' private business."

He didn't care about selling the Mormons of Deseret down the river. The USA didn't need to know he'd supplied the Mormons with weapons and advice. The damnyankees could probably figure it out for themselves, but figuring it out and proving it were two different critters.

And the damnyankees might think he would wait till this war was over to settle accounts with blacks in the CSA. He wanted to laugh. He was going to take care of that business anyway, come hell or high water.

"It's a shame we had to fight again," he said. "Now that things are decided, let's get back to business as usual. It's time for peace. We only want what's ours. Too bad we had to go to war to get it, but that's how things work out sometimes. I'm just waiting on Al Smith to set things to rights. Thank you, and good night."

The red light went out. He wasn't on the air any more. He gathered up his speech and left the soundproofed studio. Saul Goldman came out into the hallway to meet him and be the first to shake his hand. "I think that went very well, Mr. President," Goldman said.

"Thank you kindly, Saul," Featherston said. "Me, too, matter of fact."

"I hope President Smith takes you up on it," the director of communications said. He was good, amazingly good, at what he did, but no, he didn't have the fire in his belly that a lot of Freedom Party men did.

"So do I. I expect he will," Jake said. "Why wouldn't he? It's been two months, hardly even that, and we've knocked the snot out of the USA. We've done a damn sight better than the French and the British and the Russians have against Germany and Austria-Hungary, and you can take that to the bank."

Goldman nodded at that last. As they had in the last war, the Russians had tried to drown the Central Powers in oceans of blood. Against the barrels and artillery the new Kaiser's army could hurl at them, they'd made small gains for high cost-though Jake did think the Central Powers were going to lose most of the Ukraine, which had always been more nearly subject than ally.

France had reached the Rhine, driving through the rugged country to the west of the river. But she hadn't been able to cross the river, and the Germans claimed they were rallying. Action Francaise denied that with particular venom, which made Jake all the more inclined to believe it true. And the British end run through Norway had accomplished nothing but infuriating the Norwegians and pushing them over to the German side. Churchill had got himself a black eye with that one.

Only the Anglo-French thrust through the Low Countries was still going well. The Belgians had welcomed the French and British as liberators, the way the Ukrainians welcomed the Russians. The Dutch were more pro-German, but the Germans had had a lot of other things on their plate. Holland was lost to them, and some of the North German plain. If Hamburg fell… But it hadn't fallen yet.

Jake's smile showed sharp teeth. His allies might be having trouble, but he'd done what he'd set out to do. "Yeah, I reckon Smith'll come around," he said. Come across came closer to what he really meant.

"I do hope he does," Saul Goldman said earnestly. "I wish you hadn't put in that part about demilitarizing the border. He won't like that."

"He may not like it, but he'll swallow it," Featherston said. "I know my man."

He thought he did. He'd slickered Smith into agreeing to the plebiscite that brought Kentucky and the abortion called Houston back into the CSA. And Smith had believed him when he said he wouldn't put troops into the redeemed states for years. Finding an excuse to do what you needed to do anyway was never hard.

If Smith could be suckered on a deal like that, couldn't he also be suckered into leaving himself open for the next punch Jake Featherston planned to throw? Jake didn't see why not. The Yankees needed one more licking after this one, maybe even two, before they'd roll over and play dead for a good long time, the way they had after the War of Secession and the Second Mexican War. And Smith was dumb enough and weak enough-ballsless enough-to cave in one more time. Jake was so sure… "Bet you a stonewall," he said.

"Sir?" Goldman said.

"Five dollars in gold says Al Smith caves."

The communications director shook his head. "I wouldn't bet against you, Mr. President. You've shown you know what you're doing. I hope you're right again."

He wasn't saying that for the sake of flattery. More than most people around Jake, he spoke his mind. And Featherston didn't think he declined the bet because he was a cheap Jew, either. That was a measure of the respect Jake had for Goldman. The other man had turned it down because he'd thought he would lose, which was a hell of a good reason to turn down a bet.

"I reckon I am." Jake generally thought he was right, and he generally was right. He'd proved it again and again, in the Freedom Party's rise and in the way things had gone since he took the oath of office.

He was on his way back to the Gray House through the blacked-out streets of Richmond when air-raid sirens began to scream. The racket penetrated even the bulletproof glass of his armored limousine. So did the harsh, flat crumps of exploding Yankee bombs a few minutes later.

"You want me to find a shelter for you, Mr. President?" the driver asked.

The man was a Freedom Party guard. He was as tough as they came. He wasn't worried about his own neck, only about Featherston's safety. Jake knew that. All the same, he wished Willy Knight's hired guns hadn't done in Virgil Joyner. His old driver hadn't just taken care of him. He'd known him, as much as any man could.

Jake had to answer this fellow. "Hell, no, Mike," he said. "Keep going-that's all. We'll be back pretty damn quick, and this here auto can take anything but a direct hit."

"All right, sir." The driver's broad shoulders moved up and down in a shrug. "Reckoned I better ask. You suppose this raid is the damnyankees' answer to you?"

That was a different question, and a different kind of question. After a moment's thought, Featherston shook his head and said, "No, I don't believe so. They'll need a while to think about it. This here is nothing but business as usual."

He did go to the shelter when he got to the Presidential residence. He didn't want to; he would rather have stayed out and watched the show. But he knew he had to keep himself safe. Nobody else was up to the job of leading the CSA against the USA-nobody came close. The Yankees stayed over Richmond for close to two hours. Not all their bombs hit targets worth hitting, but the Confederates had the same problem when they bombed U.S. cities. Featherston still hoped Al Smith would say yes to him. The USA hadn't gone away yet, though.

Clarence Potter listened to U.S. wireless broadcasts. Had he been just anybody in the CSA, he might have got in trouble for that. But rank had its privileges. So did belonging to Intelligence. He needed to know what the enemy was saying.

Finding out wasn't always easy. The CSA and the USA jammed each other's stations. Very often, in places as close to the border as Richmond, you got nothing but howls of static as you spun the dial.

As usual, though, patience paid off. So did a wireless set a good deal more sensitive than the ones ordinary Confederates could buy. Potter brought in a Philadelphia station that broadcast President Smith's response to President Featherston's call for an end to the fighting.

Smith wasn't half-wasn't a quarter-the speaker Featherston was. All the same, he left no doubt about where he stood. Through buzzes and hisses and pops, he said, "The United States have lost a battle. We have not lost the war. As John Paul Jones said when the British called on him to surrender,, 'I have not yet begun to fight!' By treacherously attacking after loudly pledging peace, the Confederate States have gained an early advantage. I cannot deny that. I cannot conceal it. I do not intend to try. But we are still in the fight. We will stay in the fight. And wars are not decided by who starts ahead, but by who wins in the end. In the Great War, the CSA occupied Washington and threatened Philadelphia. We won even so. We can win again. We will win again. Jake Featherston has shown he is a man who cannot be trusted even when he sounds most reasonable. He has shown he cannot be trusted especially when he sounds most reasonable. We will not disarm. We will not open our borders to future aggression. This war is not over. The Confederate States started it. We will finish it. Good day."

"Shit," Clarence Potter said, and turned off the wireless. Al Smith had been slow figuring out his Confederate opponent, but he had Jake Featherston down cold now. And if the United States wouldn't curl up and die just because they'd taken a hard right to the chops, the Confederate States would have to knock them flat. Could they?

We're going to find out, Potter thought unhappily. Standing toe to toe with a bigger foe and trading punches till one side couldn't stand up any more hadn't worked during the Great War. Would it this time?

Potter shrugged. The Confederate States were better at knocking things flat than they had been a generation earlier. Unfortunately, so were the United States. The attack on Richmond the night before had been one of the worst of the war. Confederate antiaircraft gunners had fired away like madmen. Searchlights had swung through the sky. Fighters had searched the blackness for the U.S. bombers tormenting their city. But only a handful of Yankee airplanes had gone down.

The North American air war struck Potter as a duel with machine guns at a pace and a half. The CSA and USA faced each other across a long, long border. When they started smashing up each other's cities, they could hardly miss. The Confederates had got off to a better start. They'd begun gearing up for the war before their enemies had, and they'd begun with the advantage of surprise.

But the damnyankees hadn't thrown up their hands or thrown in the sponge. That they would try to ride out the CSA's first blows, stay in the war, and use their greater numbers and strength had always been Potter's worst fear. Placed where he was, he thought he understood the USA better than most of his countrymen (including Jake Featherston) did. He looked like he was right, too. That worried him.

The United States were still cut in half. Potter nodded to himself-that would help a lot. Even the biggest body still needed food. If the factories in the Northeast couldn't get the raw materials they had to have, they couldn't make guns and shells for all the millions of U.S. soldiers to shoot at their Confederate counterparts. And if the USA's soldiers couldn't shoot, what difference did it make how many of them there were? They'd lose any which way.

If I were a Yankee logistics officer, what would I be doing now? Potter wondered. He had a pretty good idea. He'd be seeing what he could get aboard freighters on the Great Lakes, and he'd be seeing how much the Canadian railroad lines north of Lake Superior could carry and how fast he could bump up their capacity.

And would all that add up to anything that could replace the rail lines and highways the Confederacy had cut? Not a chance in church. Potter didn't need to be a logistics officer to know that much. Would it add up to enough to keep the United States breathing? That was a harder question, and one for which he didn't have the answer. Neither did anybody else in the Confederate States. In one sense, that was why people fought wars: to find out such things.

Lost in calculations-and even more lost because he didn't have all the information he needed to make them-Potter jumped a little when the telephone rang. "Intelligence-Potter speaking," he said into the mouthpiece; no one on the other end of the line would know he'd been startled.

"Hello, Potter, you sly son of a bitch." That was Jake Featherston's perpetually angry rasp.

"Good morning, Mr. President. To what do I owe the honor of this call?" Potter, on the other hand, was perpetually ironic, or near enough to make no difference: an asset for an Intelligence officer.

Featherston went on, "You're laughing your ass off, aren't you, on account of you figured the United States'd keep fighting and most folks here didn't? I didn't myself, and that's a fact. I reckoned Al Smith'd see reason." He sounded angry that Smith hadn't, too.

Of course, what he called reason meant what Jake Featherston wants. Featherston didn't, couldn't, see that. And Al Smith finally saw it clearly. Potter said, "Sir, I'm not laughing. There's nothing funny about it. I wish the United States had rolled over and played dead, believe you me I do."

"Well, if they won't roll over, we goddamn well have to roll 'em over," Featherston said. He didn't quit when things failed to go the way he wanted them to. That was one of the things that made him so dangerous-and so successful.

"Yes, sir." Potter had a good deal of stubbornness in his system, too. He didn't like admitting, even to himself, that the President of the CSA had more. But he knew it was true, however little he liked it. "What can I do for you now? Besides not gloating, I mean?"

After a couple of seconds of surprised silence, Featherston offered him an anatomically unlikely suggestion. Then the President of the CSA laughed. "You've got your nerve, don't you?" He sounded more admiring than otherwise. "We've got to keep the damnyankees hopping, is what we've got to do. What sort of ways can you pump up those Mormon maniacs in Utah?"

"It would be easier if you hadn't offered them to the USA on a platter," Potter said dryly.

"Potter, it doesn't matter for hell-not for hell, you hear me?" Featherston said. "If the Devil could get those sorry sons of bitches guns, they'd take 'em and they wouldn't say boo. You gonna tell me I'm wrong about that?"

"Not me," Clarence Potter said, and he meant it. "The Mormons love the USA about as much as our niggers love the Freedom Party."

"Yeah." For once, Featherston sounded not only unhappy but also unsure of himself. He rarely hesitated, but he did now. At last, he went on, "Goddamn Yankees know about that, too. They use it to give our nuts a twist whenever they can. That one's a bitch to get a handle on."

One way to reduce the problem would have been to give Negroes in the CSA privileges to match those of whites. The Whigs had taken tentative steps in that direction during the Great War-they'd granted Confederate citizenship, as opposed to mere residence, to colored men who honorably completed a term of service in the C.S. Army. Potter had never thought that was a smart idea. What had it done but given a large cadre of Negroes training in how to shoot white men and the certain knowledge that they could?

He said, "The harder we press the United States on their home grounds, the harder the time they'll have poking us down here."

"That's how I figure it, too," Featherston said. "The best defense is giving the other bastard a good kick in the teeth before he gets his dukes up." If that wasn't Jake Featherston to the core, Potter had never heard anything that would be. Like a lot of things Featherston said, it held its share of truth. Also like a lot of things the President said, it wasn't so simple as he made it out to be.

"Even if Smith did say no, we're off to a pretty good start on that," Potter said.

"You bet we are," Featherston said, though he still sounded furious that the President of the USA hadn't done as he'd hoped. "Reason I called you, though-along with the Mormon business, I should say-is that I want your people to step up sabotage east of what we're holding in Ohio. The United States are building up to try and cut off the base of our salient, and I want 'em to have all the trouble they can handle doing it-all they can handle and then some."

"I'll take care of it, Mr. President," Potter said. That was his bailiwick, all right. "Do you have anything in particular in mind, or just general mischief?"

"Always general mischief," Featherston answered, "but not just general mischief. If nasty things happen to bridges strong enough to take barrels, the Yankees'll have a harder time coming at us, and that's what I've got in mind."

"Yes, sir," Potter said crisply, even though he couldn't help adding, "Bombing will help, too."

Jake Featherston had a nasty laugh most of the time. He sure did now. "Don't teach your granny to suck eggs. Trouble is, the high-level bombers are good for tearing hell out of a city, but the only way they can hit a bridge is fool luck. Our airplane and bombsight makers kind of sold us a bill of goods on that one."

"Looks like the USA's people sold them the same bill of goods," Potter remarked.

"Yeah, you got that right. Those high-forehead types are the same wherever you find 'em." With one casual sentence, Featherston dismissed scientists and intellectuals. He went on without even noticing what he'd done: "Mules, now, Mules can hit bridges they aim at. But the damnyankees have got antiaircraft guns coming out of their assholes, and Asskickers turn out to be sitting ducks when the other guy's waiting for them. We've lost more airplanes and more pilots than we can afford. So… sabotage where we can."

Again, that made sense. Featherston, after all, had spent three years in combat in the Great War. He'd been in at the start, and he'd still been shooting at the Yankees when the Confederacy finally threw in the sponge. When he talked about the battlefield, he knew what he was talking about.

"Sabotage where we can," Potter agreed. "I'll see who's in place in that area-and then we'll find out who talks a good game and who's serious about this business."

"Fair-weather friends," Featherston fleered.

"It happens, sir," Potter said. "Happens all the time, in fact. Some people just talk about helping us. Some will pass information, but that's all. Some, though, some will put their necks on the line."

"I reckon you'll know which ones are which," Featherston said.

"I have my notions, but I could be wrong," Potter said. "It's not like giving orders to soldiers, sir. These men are volunteers, and we mostly can't coerce them if they don't do what we say. They're behind the enemy's lines, after all. If we push them too hard, they can just go… selectively deaf, you might say."

"They better not, by God." Rage clotted the President's voice. "Might be worth exposing one or two who don't go along to the damnyankees. That'd make the rest shape up."

Pour encourager les autres, Potter thought, but Jake Featherston wouldn't have heard of Voltaire, not in a million years. Potter remembered having a similar notion himself. Thinking like the President worried him. He spoke carefully: "We need to make sure we don't scare people away from working with us."

"Handle that. I reckon you know how," Featherston said.

"I hope so, Mr. President." And I hope you go on remembering it. But Clarence Potter knew saying that would do more harm than good. He could come closer than many to being frank with the man he'd once known as a sergeant. Coming closer, though, wasn't the same as going all the way. Potter also knew that, only too well.

Colonel Irving Morrell rode along with his head and shoulders out of the cupola on his barrel's turret. He'd been doing that since the Great War, when he'd had a machine gun mounted in front of the barrel commander's hatch. Most good barrel commanders rode that way whenever they could. You could see so much more when you were actually out there looking. Riding buttoned up and peering through periscopes wasn't the same.

Of course, the better you could see, the better the enemy could see you. Barrel commanders who exposed themselves too much turned into casualties in short order. Morrell didn't want to be a casualty. He had Agnes and Mildred at home, and he hoped to come back to them. He couldn't let that get in the way of doing his job, though. Unless things improved in a hurry, the United States were in trouble.

Here, at least, he didn't have to worry so much about getting picked off. He wasn't trying to keep the Confederates from reaching the Great Lakes any more. They'd already done it. His guessing they would try that crippling stroke consoled him only a little. I should have been more ready to stop them, dammit.

Given what he'd had to work with, he supposed he'd done about as well as he could. The CSA had got serious about fighting before the USA had, and the United States were paying the price.

A green-gray barrel had pulled off the road under the shade of a spreading elm. Two men were attacking the engine with wrench and pliers. One of them aimed an obscene gesture into the air as Morrell's barrel clattered by. The rest of the crew sprawled on the grass in the shade, smoking cigarettes and probably thanking God they were out of the war-if only for a little while.

Barrels broke down more often than Morrell wished they did. They were large, heavy, complicated machines often forced to go as hard as they possibly could. In the Great War, breakdowns had put far more of them out of action than enemy fire had. Things weren't quite so bad so far in this fight, but they weren't good. From what Morrell had seen, C.S. barrels needed repair about as often as their U.S. counterparts. That was something, anyhow.

The highway leading from Martins Ferry, Ohio, down toward Round Bottom would need repair, too, after the column of barrels finished going by. Pavement plenty good enough for motorcars crumbled when caterpillar treads supporting fifteen or twenty times the weight of a motorcar dug into it. Morrell's barrel took newly gouged potholes and chunks of asphalt gouged out of the surface in stride.

Several barrels ahead of Morrell's had halted at a stream called-he checked the map-Sunfish Creek. "What the hell?" Morrell said, or perhaps something a little more pungent than that. He ducked down into his barrel to get on the wireless to the leading machine. "Why aren't you moving forward?" he demanded.

"Sir, the bridge is out," answered the lieutenant commanding that barrel.

"What the hell?" Morrell said again-or, again, words to that effect. "How did that happen? I hadn't heard anything about it."

"It looks blown, sir," the lieutenant said.

This time, Morrell's profanity drew a glance of wonder and admiration from Sergeant Michael Pound. Morrell tore the earphones off his head, climbed out of his halted barrel, and trotted south toward Sunfish Creek. He'd been wounded in the leg not long after the Great War started. Even after all these years, the thigh muscle twinged painfully when he exerted himself. That pain was as much a part of him as the thud of his heartbeat. He paid it no more mind.

Sun dapples sparkled across the surface of the stream. Oaks and willows grew down close to the bank. Thrushes hopped beneath them, careless of man's killing tools close by. Midges droned. Morrell smelled engine exhaust, hot iron, his own sweat, and, under them, the cool green odors of vegetation and running water.

Sunfish Creek flowed swiftly. That meant it was probably more than three feet deep: the depth a barrel could ford without special preparation. And someone had dropped the bridge across the creek right into it. The concrete span had a good fifteen-foot gap blown from the center. If it wasn't a professional job, the amateur who'd done it sure had promise.

"You see, sir," said the lieutenant in the lead barrel.

"I see, all right," Morrell agreed grimly. "I see sabotage, that's what I see. Somebody ought to dance at the end of a rope for this."

"Er-yes, sir." That didn't seem to have occurred to the young officer. "But who?"

"We'll set the constables or county sheriffs or whatever they've got at Round Bottom trying to figure that out," Morrell answered. "Have you sent men into the creek to find a ford?"

"Not yet, sir," the lieutenant said.

"Then do that, by God," Morrell told him. "I'll be damned if I'm going to sit around here with my thumb up my ass waiting for Army engineers to repair this span."

Two crews' worth of barrel men emerged from their machines. They seemed glad to strip off their coveralls and plunge, naked, into Sunfish Creek. The day was hot and sticky, and they'd been cooped up inside iron bake ovens since sunrise. In fact, the men seemed more inclined to swim and splash one another than to do what needed doing. "Quit skylarking, you sorry bastards!" the lieutenant shouted. "Do you want to keep Colonel Morrell waiting?"

Morrell was gratified to find that the question did get the men moving. If it hadn't, he would have jumped into the creek himself. The water looked mighty inviting. "Here you go!" a man shouted from downstream, his voice thin across perhaps a hundred yards of distance. "I can keep my balls dry all the way across-there's a little sandbar or something right here."

How badly would a column of barrels tear up that sandbar? Enough to flood the machines that came at the end? Some officers would have hesitated. Morrell didn't, not for an instant. "Well done!" he yelled to the soldier. "Go on over to the far side and mark the ford. We'll cross to you."

"Can't I get my clothes back first?" the man asked.

"No. One of your buddies will bring them. You can dress on the other side," Morrell told him. He turned to the lieutenant and added two words: "Get moving."

"Uh, yes, sir," the youngster said. He didn't get moving quite so fast as Morrell would have liked; one of the crews looking for a ford was his. They reluctantly emerged, all dripping and cool-looking, and even more reluctantly dressed again. Still, less than five minutes went by before the barrel's engine came to flatulent life. As soon as it did, Morrell jogged back to his own machine.

"A ford, sir?" Sergeant Pound asked when he got in again. Unlike that lieutenant, Pound seemed capable of independent thought. Morrell didn't have to provide the brains for him.

"That's right," the officer answered. "A ford-but a sabotaged bridge."

"We ought to take hostages," Pound said. "If there's any more trouble, we ought to execute them." Everything seemed simple to him.

"Unfortunately, this is our own country," Morrell pointed out.

"Well, sir, in that case the people around here ought to act like it," Pound said. "If they don't, they don't deserve our protection, do they?" He was calm, reasonable, and altogether bloodthirsty.

Here, Morrell was inclined to agree with him. Wasn't helping armed enemies of the United States treason? Weren't they shooting and hanging Mormons out in Utah for doing things like blowing bridges? Why shouldn't the same rules apply here in Ohio? Morrell had no answers, only questions. Setting policy wasn't his job. Carrying it out was.

He found no help in Round Bottom, Ohio, which turned out to be nothing but a wide spot in the road-and not a very wide spot, at that. It had neither policemen nor sheriff. It had a general store, a saloon, and eight or ten houses. A sign in front of the general store said WELCOME TO ROUND BOTTOM. POPULATION 29. The census-takers had been there before the war. If half that many people lived in the hamlet now, Morrell would have been astonished.

He had to check the map to find the closest real town: Woodsfield, the seat-such as it was-of Monroe County. He sent a barrel west to inform the local sheriff of the sabotage. It didn't get there as fast as he would have liked. A wireless message came crackling: "Sir, the road goes over something called Sandingstone Run."

Morrell had to look at the map again to find out where Sandingstone Run was. He discovered it was, of all things, a tributary to Sunfish Creek. "Well?" he said ominously.

"Sir, the bridge is blown," the barrel commander said.

That disgusted Morrell without surprising him. "Find a ford," he growled. "Don't waste time doing it, either. By the look of that run on the map, if you piss in it you'll send it over its banks."

He got a burst of startled laughter. "It's a little bigger than that, sir, but not a hell of a lot," the barrel commander said. "All right. We'll take care of it."

Fifteen minutes later, the barrel commander reported he was over the stream. Another delay, Morrell thought unhappily. And how many more bridges in eastern Ohio had gone splashing into the streams they crossed? More than a few, unless he missed his guess.

Maybe I should have gone to Woodsfield myself, he thought. A sheriff would pay more attention to a bird colonel than he would to Joe Blow in a barrel. Then Morrell laughed at himself. Anybody in a barrel could command attention. All he had to do was aim his cannon at the sheriff's station and threaten to start blowing things up unless he got what he wanted. Civilians couldn't do much about that except knuckle under.

And then Morrell remembered Featherston Fizzes. Somebody in what had been the state of Houston had figured out that a bottle of gasoline with a lit wick would set a barrel on fire easy as you please. Barrels were inflammable things any which way, what with paint and grease all over them. Spill burning gasoline down through the engine-decking louvers onto the motor and you really had yourself a problem.

"Sir?" The barrel commander's voice sounded in his earphones.

"I'm here," Morrell said.

"Yes, sir. Well, truth is, this town got bombed to hell and gone back I don't know when-not too long ago. Sheriff's dead. Nobody's sent out a replacement yet."

"Oh, for Christ's sake," Morrell said. But it wasn't that surprising. A replacement for a county sheriff would have been chosen in Columbus. Columbus had had other things to worry about than sending somebody with a badge out to a place where nothing ever happened anyway. These days, the Stars and Bars, damn them, flew over the capital of Ohio. Nobody there would care about Monroe County now.

"What do you want me to do, sir?" the barrel commander asked.

"Hold your position. We'll move up and join you. Describe where the ford is relative to the bridge," Morrell said. He got the column moving again. They rumbled through forest country. A sniper could have had a field day picking off barrel commanders. But there were no snipers. The things I'm grateful for these days, Morrell thought sourly. How much delay would the blown bridges between here and the start of the counteroffensive impose? And what would that do to the attack when it did get going? Nothing good. He shook his head. No, nothing good at all.