The Grapple

XI

Major Angelo Toricelli stuck his head into Abner Dowling’s office. “I have the reply from the War Department decoded, sir.”

“Oh, good,” Dowling said, and then, after getting a look at his adjutant’s face, “No, I take it back. It isn’t going to be what I wanted to hear, is it?”

“I’m afraid not, sir.” Toricelli walked in and set a sheet of paper on Dowling’s desk.

“Thanks.” The commander of the U.S. Eleventh Army peered down through his reading glasses. When he looked over the tops of them, Toricelli was in perfect focus, but the typewritten text in front of him blurred into illegibility.

He would just as soon have had it stay unreadable. Philadelphia told him he not only couldn’t have any more barrels-he couldn’t have any new artillery, either. He got the impression he was lucky to be able to keep what he had, and that it had taken special intercession from the Pope, or possibly from the Secretary of War, to keep him supplied with ammunition.

“So much for that,” he muttered.

“Sir?” Toricelli said.

“Philadelphia got all hot and bothered about Camp Determination-for about a month,” Dowling said. “Now they’ve got bigger fish to fry. Morrell’s drive into Tennessee is going well. I’m not complaining, mind you-don’t get me wrong. We need to give Featherston a couple of good ones right in the teeth. Lord knows he’s given us too many. But that means they’re forgetting everybody west of Morrell again.”

“Colonel DeFrancis-” his adjutant began.

Dowling shook his head. “His aircraft have been hitting other targets lately, too. I don’t blame him-we do need to knock out the enemy’s factories. But nobody seems to be paying attention to the poor damned niggers.”

“I’m afraid you’re right,” Major Toricelli said. “Signs are that the Confederates are shipping more blacks to the camp and taking more bodies away from it. We’ve got aerial recon photos showing they’ve dug a new trench in that field where they get rid of the bodies.”

“Bastards,” Dowling said. The word didn’t seem nearly strong enough. He doubted whether the language had words strong enough to say everything he thought about the Confederates who ran Camp Determination, the ones who fed Negroes into it, and the ones who, by backing the Freedom Party, proclaimed that it ought to exist.

Major Toricelli shrugged. “What can we do, sir?” By his tone of voice, he didn’t think the Eleventh Army could do anything.

Under normal circumstances, Dowling would have agreed with him. But circumstances here in west Texas weren’t normal. He couldn’t win the war here, no matter what he did. He couldn’t lose it no matter what he did, either. When he got plucked from Virginia and sent to the wilds of Clovis, New Mexico, they told him he’d be doing his job as long as he didn’t let the Confederates take Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Well, the Confederates damn well wouldn’t. They had to be flabbling about what was going on in Kentucky and Tennessee even more than the United States were. Their defensive force wouldn’t get many new men. He was still surprised it had got that unit of Freedom Party Guards.

“I want you to draft some new orders, Major,” Dowling said. Toricelli raised a questioning eyebrow. Dowling explained: “I want you to order this army to concentrate in and around Lubbock and to prepare for an advance as soon as possible. And get hold of Terry DeFrancis and tell him to get his fanny over here as fast as he can, because we’ll need all the air support we can get.”

“Yes, sir.” Toricelli hesitated. He’d already given the only proper answer a subordinate should. Even so, he went on, “What if the Confederates try getting around our flanks while we’re concentrating?”

“Well, what if they do?” Dowling returned. Major Torricelli’s eyebrow didn’t just rise this time. It jumped. Dowling didn’t care. “They haven’t got enough men or enough barrels around here to surround us and cut us off. This isn’t Pittsburgh, and it damn well won’t be. I aim to make enough of a commotion in these parts so that Philadelphia will have to notice me.”

“What happens if something goes wrong?” his adjutant asked.

“I go up before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War and they chop off my head,” Dowling said. That shut Major Toricelli up. Dowling was too old and too stubborn to worry much about what failure would do to his career. Toricelli doubtless worried about his, which was tied to his general’s. “Best way to keep everyone except the Confederates happy is to make sure things don’t go wrong. Draft those orders, Major, and get DeFrancis here on the double.”

“Yes, sir.” Toricelli saluted with mechanical precision and left.

Dowling chuckled under his breath. He’d given General Custer plenty of those halfhearted salutes. Somehow or other, the old boy made it work in the end, he thought. I will, too. See if I don’t.

Terry DeFrancis arrived within the hour. “What’s up, sir?” he asked. “Your adjutant made it sound like you’ve got something interesting cooking, but he wouldn’t go into any detail on the telephone.”

“Good for him,” Dowling said. When Confederate sympathizers weren’t cutting the telephone lines, they were tapping them. Security in occupied west Texas was an unending nightmare. Dowling explained what he had in mind.

“I like it,” Colonel DeFrancis said with a grin when he finished. “The more we do, the better we do, the more attention Philadelphia has to pay us. May I make one suggestion, though?”

“Go ahead,” Dowling told him.

“I think the axis of attack ought to be northeast, not southeast. For one thing, they’ll be looking for a drive on the camp. For another, it’s not much farther from here to Childress”-he used a map to show what he meant-“than it is to Snyder. If we take Childress, we cut Amarillo off from the east by road and by rail.”

Dowling had to think about that. Cutting Amarillo off was a bigger military objective than threatening Camp Determination. But the camp was a bigger political plum. Not without regret, he shook his head. “No, Colonel, we’ll continue on our present line for now. If we get the reinforcements we’re after, then we can worry about Amarillo. Prepare your mission plans accordingly.”

“Yes, sir,” DeFrancis said. Like Major Toricelli, he sounded dubious. Dowling didn’t care. One way or another, he was going to ram this through. If George Armstrong Custer’s ghost was looking over his shoulder, the old bastard must have smiled.

Shifting soldiers from yon to hither occupied the next four days. Dowling left only tiny screening forces on his flanks, calculating that he wasn’t likely to deceive the Confederates any which way-and also calculating that they didn’t have the manpower or the driving will to hurt his army while it was on the move.

He proved right. On the fifth morning, U.S. guns in and around Lubbock thundered. Bombers overhead dropped tons of death on the enemy. Fighters streaked low over the Confederate lines to shoot up trucks and command cars and troop columns and anything else they caught out in the open.

Two hours after the bombardment started, Dowling ordered his infantry and the little armor he had forward. He went forward himself, in a command car bristling with almost as many wireless aerials as a porcupine had spines. Major Toricelli, who was in the car with him, was also bristling. Dowling didn’t care about that, either. He wanted to see what happened at the front, not just hear about it from people who were really there.

The first thing he saw was a long file of prisoners in plain butternut and camouflage brown tramping back toward Lubbock, herded along by grinning U.S. soldiers in green-gray. Several of the U.S. soldiers carried captured C.S. automatic rifles-the perfect tools to use if prisoners got out of line. The glum Confederates seemed likely to behave themselves.

“Y’all don’t fight fair!” a Confederate yelled at the command car. Dowling waved back as if acknowledging a compliment.

Naturally, the terrain right on the Confederate side of the line had taken the heaviest pounding from U.S. bombs and shells. Dowling saw scenes right out of the Great War: cratered trench lines, rusty barbed wire with stretches smashed down flat by barrels so foot soldiers could get through, wrecked field guns lying on their sides. The only thing missing was the all-pervasive stink of death a landscape got after it changed hands three or four times, with neither able to bury all the corpses. Then the rats smiled and grew fat and frolicked as they fed on noisome flesh.

Not all the Confederates had surrendered or died. A nest of them were holed up in a farmhouse and barn. Though cut off and surrounded by U.S. soldiers, they wouldn’t quit. An officer in green-gray approached the barn with a white flag to see if he could talk them into coming out. They fired a burst over his head. They weren’t trying to hit him, but they were letting him know they didn’t intend to give up. He drew back in a hurry.

“Is that a bunch of Freedom Party Guards?” Dowling shouted to a sergeant serving a mortar.

“Those camouflage cocksuckers?” The noncom paused to drop a bomb down the tube. After a surprisingly small bang, it arced through the air to come down between the house and the barn. “Yes, sir, that’s them. They fight hard.”

“If we get rid of them, then, the Confederates will be in more trouble,” Dowling said.

As if the holed-up elite troops had heard him, they aimed one of their machine guns his way. He hadn’t been under gunfire for a while: not since he and Daniel MacArthur were trying to hold this part of Texas in the USA before Al Smith’s plebiscite. “Get down, sir!” Major Toricelli yelled when bullets kicked up puffs of dust not far from the command car.

“Get down, hell!” Dowling swung the pintle-mounted machine gun toward the barn and let it rip. He had a.50-caliber weapon to play with, not the rifle-caliber gun that was shooting at him. His fired bullets almost as big as his thumb. The barn had to be more than a mile away-not much more than a dot on the horizon. Even so, he had confidence he was doing the enemy some harm.

And the jackhammer roar of the gun was as much fun as a roller-coaster ride. The stink of cordite and the clatter of brass as empty cartridges flew from the breech and fell to the floor of the command car only added to the kick. He went through a belt as happily as a twelve-year-old plinking at tin cans with a.22.

If he could have made the Confederates surrender all by himself, that would have been great. No such luck. A couple of truck-drawn 105s pulled up and flattened both buildings in which the Freedom Party Guards were holed up. The shells set the barn and the farmhouse on fire. Even so, when U.S. infantrymen cautiously advanced, the surviving Confederates opened up on them with automatic weapons.

All in all, the Freedom Party Guards fought a first-rate delaying action. They did what they set out to do: they tied up enough U.S. soldiers to let their buddies withdraw in better order than they could have otherwise.

But Abner Dowling, with the bit between his teeth, was determined not to let that matter much. He had more men than the Confederates, and more artillery, and more barrels, and many more airplanes. As long as I don’t do anything stupid, he told himself, I can drive them a long way. Could he drive them all the way back to Camp Determination? He aimed to find out.

Flora Blackford had needed a while to get used to picking up the Philadelphia Inquirer and reading good news day after day. It seemed strange, unnatural, almost un-American. But instead of stories of disaster in Ohio and retreat in Pennsylvania, the paper was full of the U.S. drive through Kentucky and Tennessee, and of other progress elsewhere. By everything she could tell, U.S. bombers were hitting Richmond harder than the Confederates were hitting Philadelphia these days. New U.S. airstrips farther south meant Birmingham and Atlanta were starting to catch it, too.

Even the news west of the Mississippi seemed good, though it often got shoved back to page four or page six. Out in Texas, Abner Dowling was quoted as saying, “With more men, I could move even faster.”

Flora wanted General Dowling’s army to move faster. If U.S. soldiers could walk into Camp Determination, or could even take closeups of the vast boneyard where Jake Featherston’s men disposed of dead Negroes, the world would have to sit up and take notice…wouldn’t it?

She wished she hadn’t had that last little afterthought. When the Tsar turned the Cossacks loose on the Jews in another pogrom, did the world sit up and take notice? When the Turks enjoyed their ancient sport of slaughtering Armenians, did the world try to stop them? When the Germans treated the blacks in the Congo even worse than the Belgians had, did anybody get up on his hind legs and complain?

No, and no, and no. So why would the world flabble unduly-or at all-about what the Confederates were doing to their own people?

“To hell with the world, then,” Flora said, there in the more-or-less privacy of her office. “I care, whether it does or not.”

Her secretary stuck her head into the office. “Did you call me, Congresswoman?”

“No, Bertha. It’s all right,” Flora said. The other woman retreated. Flora shook her head. It wasn’t all right, or even close to all right. And if the world didn’t care, wasn’t that a sign something was wrong with the poor old globe?

She looked at the newspaper again. Why should Dowling complain that he didn’t have enough men? He was doing something vitally important. Shouldn’t he get all the soldiers he wanted, and more besides?

Her first impulse was to summon the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War and hold the General Staff’s toes to the fire. In 1941, she would have done it. She still might do it, but she’d learned other tricks since then. She called the Assistant Secretary of War instead.

“Hello, Flora!” Franklin Roosevelt boomed when she got through to him. “Let me guess-you’re going to want me to send about six divisions to west Texas, and to have them all there yesterday.”

“Well-yes.” Flora didn’t like being so predictable. “And now you’re going to tell me why you claim you can’t do it.”

“Simplest reason in the world: we need ’em more farther east,” Roosevelt said. “If they go to Kentucky and Tennessee, they gut the Confederacy. Gut it, I say. If I send them out to Abner Dowling, they step on its toes. That will hurt, no doubt about it. But it won’t kill, and we want the CSA dead.”

“Sending troops to Texas will stop Jake Featherston from murdering Negroes,” Flora said.

“Sending troops to Texas will stop Jake Featherston from murdering Negroes…at Camp Determination,” Roosevelt said. “It won’t do a damn thing-excuse me, but it won’t-to stop him from murdering them in Louisiana or Mississippi or east Texas. The only thing that will keep him from murdering them there is knocking the Confederate States flat. Taking land away from the enemy, taking away his factories and his railroads and his highways-that will stop him.”

He made more sense than she wished he did. “Is there any way we can compromise?” Flora asked. “I can see why you don’t want to send a lot of men and a lot of equipment to Texas. I don’t like it, but I can see it. Can you send some, though? The Confederates are bound to be having a hard time out there, too. Even a small reinforcement could tip the balance our way.”

“You’re very persuasive. You ought to be in Congress.” Roosevelt laughed merrily. “Tell you what I’ll do. Let me talk to the gentlemen with the stars on their shoulder straps. What they say we can afford, we’ll send. If they say we can’t afford anything-”

“They can come before the Joint Committee and explain why not.” Flora reminded him she had the stick as well as the carrot.

He only laughed again. “You’re very persuasive,” he said. “I suspect you may squeeze a few soldiers out of them after all.”

Flora suspected she might squeeze out some soldiers, too. Generals were often happier facing amputation without anesthesia than they were about coming before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. Amputation only cost you your leg, not your career, and the pain didn’t last nearly so long.

“Anything else?” Franklin Roosevelt asked.

“How’s the other business doing?” Flora wouldn’t go into detail or name names over the telephone. Lines into and out of Congress and into and out of the War Department were supposed to be extra secure. Some things were too important to entrust to a line that was supposed to be secure, though. She still couldn’t be sure who besides Roosevelt was listening.

He was equally careful, saying only, “Everything seems to be coming along well enough right now.”

“That’s good. They’ve made all the repairs they need?”

“I haven’t heard anything different.”

“All right. Anything new from the foreign factories?” Flora hoped he would understand she was asking how the Confederacy and Germany and England and France-and Russia and Japan, too, come to that-were faring in their quest for a uranium bomb.

“I haven’t heard anything new lately,” he replied. “Of course, just because I haven’t heard it, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.”

“I know,” she said unhappily. That was true even of the Confederates’ project, and they were right across the border and spoke the same language. How much could the USA find out about what the Germans, say, were doing? They were allies, but they were being tight-lipped about anything that had to do with uranium. The Russians and the Japanese were probably behind in the race-Flora hoped they were, anyway-but she didn’t see how her country could learn anything about what they were doing unless they got amazingly careless with their codes.

“If I hear anything, you’ll know about it,” Roosevelt promised, and then, “Oh, that reminds me.”

Did he sound a little too casual? Flora thought he did. “Reminds you of what?” she asked, trying not to show it.

“I’d like to send a team to your office and to your apartment, to sweep them for microphones,” he said. “Don’t want to take chances, you know.”

“No, I suppose not.” Flora sighed. “All right-go ahead.” Of course, the Confederates-or any other spies-could plant mikes again right after the inspection team finished. A whore might be healthy when a government doctor looked her over, then catch something nasty from her next customer and spread it till she was inspected again. In both cases, though, you had to try.

“Thanks, Flora. The leader of the team is a master sergeant named Bernstein. If he’s not there, go somewhere else and call the guards.”

“Will do,” Flora said. “’Bye.” She hung up.

The team showed up at her office the next morning. She exchanged Yiddish gibes with Sergeant Bernstein. If he was by any chance a Confederate spy, he was a brilliant one. Bertha squawked when he and his men ran their detectors over her desk. “Sorry, lady. Gotta be done,” he said. “Anything, Bob?” he asked the tall, blond soldier who was checking there.

“Looks like zip, Carl,” the private answered. He towered over his boss, who was little and dark and probably hadn’t combed his hair in three or four days.

They also didn’t find anything in Flora’s office. “Either you’re clean or the Confederates are smarter than they look,” Sergeant Bernstein declared.

“Which is it likely to be?” Flora asked.

“Never can tell,” he said seriously. “Most of their sh-uh, stuff-is just a little behind ours, but they’re mighty good with it. And some of what they use is ours.” He made a sour face. “You can walk into a wireless shop and buy it right on the street, and the bastards do.”

“Is that the price we pay for being a free country?” Flora asked.

“Don’t ask me. I’m just a shlemiel with stripes,” Bernstein answered. “But if we stop being free because those mamzrim can steal too easy, that ain’t so good, neither.” He turned to the other soldiers. “Come on, Bob, Dick. We got other places to check.”

Flora found one more question as the men in green-gray packed up to go: “Secretary Roosevelt said you’d come to my apartment, too. When will that be?”

Sergeant Bernstein checked some papers in a clipboard. “Day after tomorrow, probably in the morning. You be there?”

“If I won’t, my son will,” Flora said. “I’ll tell him you’re coming, and that he should let you in.”

“Oughta work.” Bernstein looked from one of his men to the other. “You guys aren’t ready yet? Watsamaddawidya?” To get that all out in one word, he had to hail from New York City.

“Well, let me say this-” Dick began.

Bernstein cut him off. “No, don’t say it. Just come on.” To Flora, he added, “Get him started and he won’t shut up.” Dick’s blackly stubbled face burned with resentment, but the sergeant got him out of there before he could loose any of it.

When Flora got home, she was all set to tell Joshua about the soldiers who would stop by in a couple of days. But that never happened. Her son showed her an envelope. “Look what came today!” He sounded excited about it.

That particular envelope, as Flora knew too well, hadn’t changed much since the days of the Great War. The Old English typography on the cheap paper was almost the same, too:

U.S. Army Department of Selection for Service.

Joshua might be excited. Flora knew nothing but horror. “We can beat it,” she said automatically. “We can quash it.”

“No,” Joshua said. “This is my country. I’ll fight for it, the same as anybody else would.”

“It’s not a game, Joshua.” Flora knew she sounded desperate. She felt desperate. “Uncle David walks on one leg. Cousin Yossel never knew his father. If anything happened to you, I don’t think I could stand it.”

“Nothing will happen, Mother.” At eighteen, Joshua was confident in his own immortality. An uncle? A cousin’s father? So what? Joshua had never known the first Yossel Reisen, either. He went on, “After the war, they’ll ask me, ‘What did you do?’ Shall I say I hid behind your skirts?”

Yes! Please God, yes! Flora wanted to scream it. Only the certain knowledge that it wouldn’t help kept her quiet. She started to cry instead. That didn’t help, either, but she couldn’t help herself.

Somewhere out ahead in the Atlantic, the British and French fleets prowled. Sam Carsten kept glancing toward the Josephus Daniels’ Y-ranging screens. Nothing showed up except the returns from the U.S. ships all around the destroyer escort. No enemy airplanes had smelled out where the U.S. fleet lay.

“This could be the big one,” Pat Cooley said.

“You’re right-it could,” Sam agreed. “I went through the Battle of the Three Navies, and I never thought there’d be a bigger fight than that. But maybe I was wrong.”

“This would be a different kind of fight,” the exec said.

“Oh, just a little,” Carsten said. Southwest of Oahu, U.S. warships had slugged it out with their British and Japanese counterparts with big guns. This time around…“Chances are we’ll never see the fleet that sends airplanes at us, and they won’t see our ships, either.”

“We’ve got some battlewagons along just in case,” Cooley said, “but I think you’re right.”

“I know they’re here. The Dakota’s one of ’em.” Sam shivered. “I don’t ever want to go on another wild ride-you can just bet your ass I don’t.” A shell hit had jammed the battleship’s steering, and she sped on a mad arc through the U.S. fleet, ending up much too close to the enemy. She took a lot of hits, but she kept shooting back, too. To this day, both sides claimed victory in that fight near the Sandwich Islands. As far as Sam could tell, they’d both lost.

Lieutenant, j.g., Thad Walters stiffened in front of the Y-ranging set. “Sir, I’ve got a bogey to the northeast,” the youngster said, his voice quivering with excitement.

“Give me range and bearing,” Sam snapped. As soon as he had them, he swung the destroyer escort’s blinker light toward the closest cruiser to pass the word. The whole fleet, of course, sailed under wireless silence. Before he started flashing, the cruiser began sending him a signal. As he read it, he laughed.

So did Pat Cooley. “Well, sir, at least their Y-ranging operator isn’t asleep at the switch.”

“Swell,” Sam said. The exec smiled. So did Sam, wryly. He couldn’t win, and he knew it. If he said something like swell, he marked himself as an old-timer trying to sound up to the minute. But if he said something like bully, he marked himself as an old-timer not bothering to stay up to date, which had to be even worse.

U.S. fighters from the combat air patrol streaked toward the foreign airplane. If they let it keep coming, it would find the fleet and pass the word on to the enemy ships somewhere off to the east. If they shot it down before it found the U.S. ships, that would also tell the limeys and frogs something, but not so much. And if they made it try to run before they shot it down, they might be able to use its flight path to get an idea of where the enemy lay.

Sam watched the fighters till they vanished from sight, then went over to the Y-ranging screens and watched them there. He could tell just when the enemy aircraft spotted them: it broke off its advance and turned away as fast as it could go.

“What’s that bearing?” he asked Walters.

“Sir, the course is 105-a little south of east,” the Y-ranging officer answered.

“So somewhere along that line from where it started, that’s where the ship that sent it out is likely to be,” Carsten said.

“Well, we don’t know that for a fact, sir-that airplane could be bluffing, trying to throw us off,” Walters said. “But I think it’s a pretty good bet.”

“Me, too,” Sam said, and then, “Mr. Cooley, is the cruiser reporting that scout aircraft’s course?”

“No, sir.”

“Then signal it over there, if you please. Chances are they’re checking it themselves, but I don’t want to take even the smallest chance with something this important.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Cooley was faster with Morse than Sam was himself.

“Sir, we’ve got a hydrophone contact!” That was Chief Bevacqua. The CPO was the best man on the ship at making sense of what came back from the pings the underwater equivalent of Y-ranging sent out. “Bearing 165, range about half a mile. It’s shallow, sir, and the contact feels like a goddamn submersible.”

“Jesus Christ!” Ice shot up Sam’s back. A sub that close could sink the Josephus Daniels easy as you please. “Change course to 165-we’ll give it the smallest target we can. Man the ashcan flinger! Pat! Signal the cruiser that we’ve got the worst kind of company!”

“Aye aye, sir!” Cooley said again, but before he could finish the signal the submarine announced its own presence. It cared little for anything as small as the destroyer escort. The light cruiser made a much more tempting target. Two torpedoes slammed into her. As soon as she was hit, the submersible dove.

By then, though, the Josephus Daniels hovered over the sub. Depth charges splashed into the Atlantic. Down below, the submersible would be doing everything it could to get away, but its underwater electric motors were painfully slow. The skipper down there-British? French? Confederate?-would have heard the ashcans going into the water. Could he get away? Could he get deep enough to avoid and evade?

Even up on the surface, each burst from the spread felt like a kick in the teeth. Then Sam heard a noise like a slammed metal door-the pressure hull caving in from the explosions. “We got him,” he said soberly.

“He got us, too,” Cooley said-the cruiser was listing badly.

“Do they want us to take men off, or does their skipper think she’ll stay afloat?” Sam asked. Rage filled him, rage at himself. Destroyers and destroyer escorts sailed with the fleet to keep submarines away. He hadn’t done his job. Any enemy country would gladly trade a sub for a cruiser.

“For now, they think she’ll stay up,” Cooley answered. More flashing Morse came from the cruiser. “We get an ‘attaboy’ for sinking that submersible. They heard it cave in over there, too.”

“Hot damn,” Sam said bitterly. He spoke to the hydrophone operator: “Keep your ears open, Bevacqua.”

“Will do, sir,” the petty officer replied. “I feel like hell on account of that fucker suckered me. He must’ve snuck in under a warm layer or something. Even so-”

“Yeah. Even so,” Sam said. “Well, do your damnedest.” He didn’t look forward to the after-action report. He had to hope he lived to write one.

More airplanes came off the carriers’ flight decks, and more, and still more. They formed up into attacking squadrons above the U.S. fleet, then zoomed off to the east. “I think we’ve found the enemy fleet,” Cooley said.

“That’s what we came for.” Sam paused. “Of course, they came to find us. If they don’t already know where we’re at, seeing where our airplanes are coming from will kind of give them a hint.”

“I know the limeys have Y-ranging. From what I’ve heard, theirs may even be better than ours,” Cooley said. “I’m not so sure about the French.”

“Well, once they see the limeys launching airplanes, they won’t do a whole lot of waiting around after that,” Carsten said, and the exec nodded. Sailors wrestled more depth charges up on deck to replace the ones the Josephus Daniels used to sink the enemy submersible.

Half an hour went by. Then Thad Walters said, “We’ve got aircraft coming in from the east, sir. They’re not likely to be friendlies.”

“How far out are they?” Sam asked.

“Maybe fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“All right. Thanks.” It wasn’t, and Sam had no reason to be grateful, but he said the polite words anyway. Then he got on the PA system: “We’re going to have company in a little while. Chances are they’ll go after the airplane carriers and battleships ahead of us, but you never can tell. Any which way, our job is to get as many rounds in the air as we can. Some of them will do some good, I promise. We’ve put a lot of work in on our gunnery. This is where it pays off.”

“We’re a lot better than we were when you took over this ship, sir,” Cooley said.

“Thanks, Pat.” This time, Sam did mean it. But he went on, “Better doesn’t count. Are we good enough? Well, we’ll find out pretty damn quick.”

Some of the ships farther east, at the very forefront of the U.S. fleet, started firing. Black puffs of smoke fouled the blue sky. Peering between the puffs with a pair of field glasses, Sam spotted wings and fuselages glinting in the sun. His belly tightened. His balls wanted to crawl up from his scrotum. He’d been on a ship attacked from the air as early as 1917. He’d been on the Remembrance when the Japanese sank her. Good men were going to die here in the middle of the Atlantic. So would good ships. With luck, more of them would die a couple of hundred miles to the east, out over the curve of the world. Neither side’s ships would see the other’s today.

With a thunderous roar, the Josephus Daniels’ guns cut loose:.50-caliber machine guns, twin 40mm antiaircraft guns, and the 4.5-inch popguns that were her main armament. Those could reach higher and farther than the lighter weapons, but couldn’t fire nearly so fast. “Evasive action, Mr. Cooley,” Sam said. “All ahead flank speed!”

“Aye aye, sir!” The exec relayed the command to the engine room. He started zigzagging as the ship’s speed built up. It wouldn’t build up enough. Sam wished for the extra six or seven knots a real destroyer could give him. But then, how much difference would they make against an airplane?

A burning fighter slammed into the Atlantic before Sam could see which side it belonged to. A great black cloud of smoke rose from a stricken ship. He swore. He’d known it would happen, but that didn’t make it any easier to take.

“We’ve got to keep some carriers,” Sam said, more to himself than to anyone else. “Otherwise, we won’t be able to land our airplanes when they come home.”

A fighter with a blue-white-red British roundel dove on the destroyer escort, guns blazing. Bullets whined through the air and clanged off metal. Here and there, men sprawled in spreading pools of blood. Sailors got the wounded down to the sick bay. The ship had no doctor, only a couple of pharmacist’s mates. They would have to do what they could. When things calmed down, they could transfer the men hurt worst to a bigger ship with a real surgeon or even to a hospital ship.

Uncounted tracers pursued the enemy airplane, but it got away. Exultant shouts rang out a few minutes later, when a torpedo airplane splashed into the sea. Sailors at the forward 40mm guns jumped and swaggered and pounded their hairy chests like so many gorillas.

Too much was going on too fast in too many places for Sam to have more than a vague idea of how this end of the fight was going-and he had no way to know what was happening off to the east. If everything here and there went perfectly, the battleships could storm off and pound the enemy ships to pieces…but he didn’t think things were going perfectly. Now several greasy black smoke plumes rose into the clean, salt-scented air.

“I hope we’re hurting them worse than they’re hurting us,” Pat Cooley said, exactly echoing his own thought.

After most of an hour, no more enemy aircraft remained overhead. They’d either gone down or flown off toward the east. They might clash with returning U.S. airplanes coming west. As Sam steered the Josephus Daniels toward a listing escort carrier, he realized he might have fought in two great naval battles now where nobody had the faintest idea who’d won.

“Agreat naval victory in the Atlantic!” blared the wireless set behind the bar in the sleazy seaside San Diego saloon. “British and French claims of triumph are the spasmodic bleating of frightened sheep!”

“Baaa!” George Enos said, looking up from his beer. “What do you think, Chief?”

“Just have to wait and see,” Fremont Dalby answered. “What happens next will tell the story. They said we were licking the Confederates in Ohio, too, when the bastards were really kicking our ass. Or does it look different to you?”

“Nah, that sounds about right,” George said.

“If we go on and blast the crap out of the convoys coming up from South America, then we honest to God did whip the limeys,” Dalby continued, for all the world as if he had an admiral’s broad gold stripe on each sleeve. “If they go on and link up with the Confederates and give us a hard time in our own waters, they walloped us instead.”

“I got you,” George said. “And if neither one happens-”

“It’s a push,” Fritz Gustafson put in.

“There you go.” Dalby nodded emphatically. The empty glass in front of him, and the ones that had preceded it, no doubt had something to do with that emphasis. He put money on the bar, and the man in a boiled shirt and bow tie behind it gave him a full glass and took away the empty one. After a sip, the gun chief went on, “I mean, I think we really are no shit smacking the Confederates around, ’cause we wouldn’t be down in fucking Tennessee if we weren’t. Past that, though…Well, who knows how much to believe?”

“Who cares?” As usual, Gustafson got a lot of mileage out of a few words.

“That’s it.” George drained his beer and nodded to the bartender. The man worked the tap but didn’t hand over the beer till he got paid. George sipped, then sucked foam off his upper lip. “We’ve got to keep doing our job no matter what the big picture looks like. We’ll figure out what it all means later on.”

Down at the far end of the bar, two Marines started slugging at each other. Sometimes, as George knew too well, a brawl like that made the whole joint explode. This time, other young men in forest-green uniforms grabbed the brawlers and sat on them. “Lots of leathernecks in town lately,” Dalby remarked.

“They train here,” George said.

Dalby shook his head. “I mean even besides that,” he said. “Something’s up, I bet.”

“Could be,” George said. “Maybe they’re going to go down and take Baja California away from the Mexicans.”

“Possible,” Dalby said thoughtfully. “We tried that in the last war, and it didn’t work. Maybe we’d have more luck this time around.”

“We could blockade the Confederates at Guaymas.” George warmed to the idea-it was his, after all. “If we did, they couldn’t even get their subs out. That would make it like they didn’t have any ports on the Pacific.”

“I’ve heard notions I liked less,” Fremont Dalby allowed.

“Me, too,” Gustafson said, which was a solid accolade.

“If they send the Marines south, I bet we go along, too,” George said. “We could do shore bombardment and keep the submersibles away from the landing craft.”

Dalby laughed at him. “You tell ’em, Admiral,” he said, reversing the thought George had had a moment before. But that held more admiration than derision, for he turned to Fritz Gustafson and said, “He’s not as dumb as he looks, is he?”

“Not always, anyhow,” Gustafson said-more praise, of sorts.

The next morning, George hardly remembered his prediction. You could get hung over on beer if you worked at it, and he’d been diligent the day before. Black coffee and aspirins took the edge off his pounding headache, but left his stomach feeling as if shipfitters were using blowtorches in there. His buddies seemed in no better shape. That was some consolation, but only some.

Two days later, the Townsend put to sea with several other destroyers, the escort carriers that had raided Baja California before, and a gaggle of slow, ugly landing craft. Surveying them as they waddled along, Fremont Dalby said, “It’s a good thing the Empire of Mexico has a horseshit Navy. A real fleet could sink those sorry wallowers faster than you can say Jack Robinson.”

George would have argued, except he thought Dalby was right. “I’m glad I’m not on one of those scows,” he said.

“Amen, Brother Ben!” Dalby exclaimed. “You’d be puking your guts out every inch of the way. I know you’ve got a good stomach-I’ve seen it. But you could put a statue into one of those damn things and it’d barf brass by the time we got down to Cabo San Lucas.”

They didn’t get down to Cabo San Lucas. The Marines went ashore about halfway down the Baja peninsula. That had Dalby and the handful of other old-timers on the destroyer muttering to themselves. The Army had landed in almost the same spot during the Great War, and had had to pull out not much later. George couldn’t see that it mattered one way or the other. Once you got south of Tijuana, Baja California didn’t have enough of anything except rocks and scorpions-but it sure had plenty of those.

The Mexican coastal garrison held its fire till the landing craft got close, then opened up with several batteries of three-inch guns that were a generation out of date on the big battlefields farther east but that still worked just fine.

Keeping quiet let those guns escape the fury of the dive bombers that flew off the escort carriers to soften up the landing zone before the Marines went in. As soon as they started firing, all the real warships with the flotilla blasted away with their main armament from ranges at which the smaller land-based guns couldn’t reply. One by one, the Mexican cannon fell silent. They weren’t playing possum this time, either. George wouldn’t have wanted to be on the receiving end of that shellacking.

But they’d done more damage than anyone on the U.S. side would have expected. A couple of landing craft were on fire, and a couple of more had simply gone down to the shallow bottom of the Pacific. Machine guns greeted the men in those dark green uniforms who splashed ashore.

The dive bombers returned and pounded the machine-gun nests. So did guns from the Townsend and her comrades. Fighters strafed the rocks just beyond the beach. Peering shoreward with binoculars, Fremont Dalby said, “We’re whaling the crap out of them. Only bad thing is, you can’t hardly see them at all-their khaki matches the landscape real good. The leatherheads stick out like sore thumbs, poor bastards.”

“Somebody was asleep at the switch, not giving them the right kind of uniforms,” George said. “The Confederates are starting to wear camouflage, for Christ’s sake. Least we could do is have our guys not look like Christmas trees in the desert.”

“Probably figured we were only fighting Mexicans, so what difference did it make?” Dalby said. “That’s how they think back in Philadelphia. But anybody with a rock in front of him and a gun in his hands is trouble. What are we doing making things easier for him?”

“Acting dumb,” Fritz Gustafson said, which was all too likely to be true.

They had the time to gab, because the Townsend didn’t come close enough to shore for them to open up with their 40mm guns. That would have let the Mexicans shoot back. No enemy airplanes appeared overhead. If they had, the fighters from the escort carriers would have dealt with them before the antiaircraft guns could-George hoped so, anyhow.

He watched the Marines hack out a toehold on the barren Mexican coast. “Boy, if the Confederates weren’t over on the far side of the Gulf of California, I’d say the Mexicans were fucking welcome to this Baja place,” he remarked.

“You notice the Confederate States didn’t buy it when they picked up Sonora and Chihuahua,” Fremont Dalby said. “You notice we didn’t take it away after we won the Great War. Goddamn Mexicans are welcome to it.”

George looked at his wristwatch. “Other crew’s coming on pretty soon. They’re welcome to it, too. I want some shuteye.” He yawned to show how much he wanted it. “This watch-and-watch crap is for the birds.”

“What? You don’t like four hours on, four hours off around the clock?” Dalby said in mock surprise. “You want more than a couple-three hours of sleep at a time? Shit, Enos, what kind of American are you?”

“A tired one,” George answered. “A hungry one, too. If I eat, I don’t get enough sleep. If I don’t eat, I still don’t get enough sleep, but I come closer, and I get hungry like a son of a bitch. I can’t win.”

Dalby scraped his index finger over his thumbnail. “There’s the world’s smallest goddamn violin playing sad songs for you. That shows how sorry I am. You’re not talking about anything I’m not doing.”

“I know, Chief,” George said quickly. One advantage of Gustafson’s usual silence was that he couldn’t get in trouble by opening his big mouth too wide and falling in.

When the other crew took over at the twin 40mm, George raced down to the galley and snagged a ham sandwich and a mug of coffee. He inhaled them, then climbed into his hammock. It was hot and stuffy belowdecks, but he didn’t care. The destroyer’s five-inch guns roared every so often, but he didn’t care about that, either. He thought he could have slept on top of one of them.

He was punchy and groggy when he got shaken awake, and needed a minute or two to remember where he was, and why, and what he was supposed to be doing. “Oh, God,” he groaned, “is it that time already?”

“Bet your ass, Charlie,” his tormentor said cheerfully, and went on to rout other victims from sleep.

The sun had set. On the shore, tracers zipped back and forth. The U.S. Marines used yellow or red tracer rounds. Maybe the Mexicans had been buying theirs from the Empire of Japan, because they were ice blue. It made for a bright and cheerful scene-or a scene that would have been bright and cheerful if George hadn’t known that those tracers, along with all the ordinary bullets he couldn’t see, were fired with intent to kill.

“Looks like we’re holding more ground than we were when I sacked out,” he said.

“Yeah, I think so,” Fremont Dalby agreed. “Now that we’re holding it, though, what are we going to do with it?”

“Beats me,” George said. “But I’ll tell you one thing-I’d sooner be fighting Francisco Jose’s boys than Hirohito’s any old day.”

“Well, if you think I’ll argue with that, you’re crazier than one man’s got any business being,” the gun chief replied. “The Japs are tough, and their gear is as good as ours. These guys…They’re using stuff left over from the last war, and you have to figure most of ’em don’t want to be here.”

“Would you?” George said. “It’s got to be hell on earth. Hot sun. Rocks. Rattlesnakes-gotta think so, anyway. Most of those guys probably just want to go back to their farms and make like none of this ever happened.”

“Sounds good to me,” Dalby said. “If we go home and the Confederates go home, who’s left to fight? See? Piece of cake. They’ll be calling with the Nobel Peace Prize any goddamn day now. Want to split it?”

“Sure? Why not?” George said. On the barren, desolate coast of Baja California, something blew up with a rending crash. “Hope that was on the Mexican side of the line,” George said. Fremont Dalby nodded.

Aprivate came up to Chester Martin with a half-grim, half-sick expression on his face. Seeing that, Martin knew what he was going to say before he said it. But say it he did: “Sarge, they found Don. Bushwhackers caught him. It ain’t pretty.”

“Shit,” Chester said. “This is worse than Kentucky, all right.” Kentucky had gone back and forth between the CSA and the USA. Most people there hated Yankees, but a fair-sized minority didn’t. Even some of the ones who hated Yankees understood they didn’t come equipped with horns and tails.

Here in central Tennessee, none of the locals seemed to have got the news. They reacted to soldiers in green-gray as if to demons from hell. Some of them ran, while the rest tried to fight back. Civilians weren’t supposed to fight back. If anybody’d told that to the Confederates, it didn’t sink in.

“What are we going to do, Sarge?” the private asked.

“I know what I want to do,” Chester answered. “I want to take hostages. And if the bastard who did that to Don doesn’t turn himself in, I want to shoot the son of a bitch.”

“Yeah!” the private said savagely.

“I can’t do it on my own,” Chester said. “My ass’d be in a sling if I tried it. But I bet Captain Rhodes can.”

Hubert Rhodes was newly in command of the company, which had had two COs wounded on back-to-back days before he arrived. Unless he was unlucky, Martin didn’t think he’d be easy to kill. He was tough and skinny, with a thin, dark mustache and gray eyes that seemed to see everywhere at once. He didn’t mind having a noncom head up a platoon, which gave him another good mark in Chester’s book.

When Chester found him, he was field-stripping and cleaning a captured Confederate automatic rifle. He carried it himself, in lieu of the usual officer’s.45. He put himself where the enemy could shoot at him, and he wanted to be able to answer with as much firepower as he could.

He looked up before Chester got very close. You couldn’t get close to him without his knowing it. “What can I do for you, Sergeant?” he asked. By the way he talked, he came from somewhere in the Midwest.

“Damn Confederate bushwhackers just murdered one of my men, sir,” Martin replied. “Murdered him and did nasty things to the body after he was dead. I hope after, anyway.”

Rhodes’ mouth was never wide and giving. It tightened more than usual now. “What do you want to do about it?” he asked. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“Take hostages, sir,” Chester said. “We may not make ’em stop this shit, but we can make it expensive for ’em.”

Without looking at the weapon he was working on, Rhodes reassembled it. His hands didn’t need his eyes’ help to know what they were doing. He got up and lit a cigarette: also Confederate plunder. “Sounds good. Let’s do it,” he said. “You think ten’s enough, or do you want twenty?”

“Twenty,” Martin said. “This isn’t the first man we lost like that. If Featherston’s soldiers shoot us, it’s one thing. We shoot them, too. But these cocksuckers…They think nobody can touch ’em because they’re in civilian clothes.”

“We’ll do it,” Captain Rhodes said. “Your men up for firing-squad duty if it comes to that? Chances are it will, you know.”

“Yes, sir,” Chester said without the slightest hesitation. “If it’s a Confederate, they’ll shoot it.”

“Old men? Boys too young to shave? Maybe even women?” Rhodes persisted. “Won’t be a lot of men of military age in this Woodbury place. The ones who did live there, the war’s already sucked ’em into uniform.”

“Any Confederate hostages we take, they’ll shoot,” Chester Martin said confidently. “They know damn well the Confederates’d shoot them if they got the chance.”

“Then let’s round up some soldiers, and let’s round up some hostages,” Rhodes said.

Rounding up soldiers was the easiest thing in the world. By then, the whole company had heard about what happened to their comrade. Had Captain Rhodes given the order, they wouldn’t just have taken hostages in Woodbury, Tennessee. They would have wiped the place off the face of the earth.

Woodbury might have held five hundred people before the war started-fewer now, of course. The stores in the center of town were old and weathered; the courthouse-it was a county seat-so shiny and new, it had probably gone up in Jake Featherston’s administration. Slopes north of the courthouse square were given over to crops; those to the south held houses.

Soldiers formed a perimeter around the houses. Then they went through them and seized twenty men, all under eighteen or over fifty except for one who’d lost his right arm, probably in the last war. They also killed one old man who fired a shotgun at the U.S. soldiers heading up his walk. He must not have taken careful aim: he winged one man in green-gray, but most of the blast went over the soldiers’ heads.

Once the hostages were taken, Captain Rhodes assembled the rest of the townsfolk in the square. They stared at him with sullen hatred only slightly tempered by the snouts of the machine guns staring at them from sandbagged revetments.

“We had a soldier murdered by bushwhackers,” Rhodes told the locals. “That kind of cowardice runs dead against the laws of war, and we don’t aim to put up with it. We’ve taken hostages. If the killer doesn’t come forward inside of twenty-four hours, we will execute them.”

“I did it.” A man with a white mustache stepped forward. “You can shoot me if you’ve got to shoot somebody.”

“What did you do to the body after it was dead?” Chester asked.

The man blinked. “I smoked a cigarette over it, by God. Then I went home.”

“You’re a liar. You’re brave, but you’re a liar,” Chester said. “Get back where you belong.” Crestfallen, the man went back into the crowd.

“Anybody else?” Captain Rhodes asked. No one said a word. He looked at his watch. “All right. The clock is ticking.”

One of the hostages started to blubber. “You got no business doing this to me,” he said. “No business, you hear? I never done nothin’ to nobody.”

“Too goddamn bad,” said a man in Chester’s platoon. “You wasted a hell of a chance, then, didn’t you?”

“This won’t bring your soldier back,” another hostage said.

“That’s true,” Chester said. “But maybe it’ll make somebody else with a squirrel gun and not a hell of a lot of sense think twice. And even if it doesn’t, it pays you people back.”

“An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” Captain Rhodes agreed. “Except we’re taking a whole mouthful of teeth.”

Confederate artillery came in that evening. Maybe someone managed to slip out of Woodbury and let the enemy soldiers know what was going on. But the shells mostly fell short-the front kept moving south. Chester wasn’t sorry not to be right up on the firing line for a while. He slept in his foxhole with his Springfield beside him. If anybody tried to give him trouble, he aimed to give it first.

But he slept till sunup, and woke with nothing worse than a stiff back. He didn’t remember being so tight and sore the last time around. Of course, that was more than half a lifetime ago now. He’d been a young man then. He scratched his belly, which was larger these days. No, he wasn’t a young man any more.

“Anybody come forward?” he asked, opening a ration can.

“Get serious, Sarge,” answered one of the soldiers who was already eating. “Those fuckers are brave enough to shoot somebody who isn’t looking, but they won’t put their own necks on the line when it counts.”

“That one geezer who tried to volunteer had balls,” Chester said.

“Sure. But the point is, he didn’t really do anything,” the soldier replied. “The fellow who did sneak around, he’s still sneaking.”

“He must be pretty sneaky, too,” Martin said. “If the people with kin who got taken hostage knew who he was, you have to figure somebody’d rat on him to save a husband or a son or a brother.”

The soldier only shrugged. “Hasn’t happened-that’s all I can tell you.”

“Well, they’ve got…what, another couple of hours?” Chester said. The soldier nodded. Chester shrugged. “We’ll see what happens then, that’s all.”

What happened then was what he’d expected: U.S. soldiers paraded the hostages out to the town square. Some soldiers had set a post in the ground in front of the courthouse. Captain Rhodes ordered the townsfolk of Woodbury out to watch the executions. “This is what you get when civilians try to fight in a war,” he said. “You’d better remember it.” He gestured to Chester Martin. “Will you do the honors?”

“Yes, sir. Don was in my platoon.” Chester waited till the soldiers had tied the first hostage to the pole. Then he gestured to the men in the firing squad. “Ready!” They brought up their Springfields. “Aim!” The riflemen drew a bead on the white paper pinned over the hostage’s heart. “Fire!”

A dozen rifles barked as one. The hostage slumped against his bonds. Blood poured from his wounds. He writhed, but not for long. In the crowd, a couple of women screamed. Another one fainted. So did a man.

U.S. soldiers cut the dead hostage down and marched another one, a young one, over to take his place. The youth’s shout of, “Freedom!” cut off abruptly when the men from the firing squad pulled their triggers. More screams rang from the crowd. A girl about his age tried to charge the soldiers. Not too roughly, they kept her from hurting them or herself, then shoved her back to her relatives. The locals held on to her to make sure she didn’t try again.

Most of the hostages died as well as men could. Four or five wept and begged. It did them no good. Chester called, “Ready!…Aim!…Fire!” over and over again. Finally, the men in green-gray cut down the last bloody body.

“Bury your dead,” Captain Rhodes told the townsfolk. “And remember, chances are whoever made us do this is still right here with the rest of you. Some of you may even have a pretty good notion who he is. But he kept quiet, and you kept quiet, and this is what you get. You leave us alone, we won’t harm you. If you break the laws of war, you’ll pay. You have paid.”

The courthouse square stank of cordite and blood and shit. It stank of fear, too; Chester had smelled that smell too many times to have any doubts about what it was. For once, he didn’t smell his own fear.

He made sure he patted each man from the firing squad on the back. “You did good,” he told them. “That wasn’t easy, doing what you guys did. I’m proud of you.”

“Those fuckers had it coming,” said one of the men in green-gray. Several other soldiers nodded.

But another man said, “You’re right, Sarge-it wasn’t easy. They were just…people. They didn’t hurt anybody. I did this once, but I don’t think I ever want to do it again.”

“All right, Lewis. You won’t, then,” Martin promised. “Go off and smoke a cigarette. If you’ve got any booze, take a knock. I’ll look the other way. You earned it.”

“I don’t, Sarge,” Lewis said mournfully.

“Don’t worry about it, Frankie,” another soldier said. “I got a pretty good idea where you can get your hands on some.”

Chester turned his back so they wouldn’t see him smile. They were kids doing a man’s job. What about me? he wondered. I’m no kid any more. He was trying to do a man’s job, too, and it wasn’t any easier for him than it was for them.

Arifle on his shoulder, Jonathan Moss trudged along through the muggy hell that was summertime in Georgia. He turned to Nick Cantarella and remarked, “Up at 25,000 feet, where I’m supposed to be fighting, it’s cold enough for me to need fur and leather. Even up above this, it’s still that cold.”

“Yeah, well, that’s how the ball crumbles,” the infantry officer answered. “That’s the way the cookie bounces.”

Spartacus looked from one escaped U.S. POW to the other. “You damnyankee ofays, you fuckin’ crazy, you know dat?” the guerrilla leader said.

“Thanks,” Moss said, which wasn’t likely to convince Spartacus he was wrong. Cantarella chuckled. A couple of the blacks who were close enough to listen to the byplay tapped index fingers against their temples or spun them by their ears to show whom they agreed with.

The guerrillas held the countryside. It did them less good than Moss wished it would. With so many big farms growing one big crop-cotton or peanuts or tobacco-and with so many Negroes taken off the countryside after agriculture was forcibly mechanized, the rebels had a devil of a time feeding themselves. Some of their raids on towns came from no better reason than the need to steal enough food to keep from starving.

Towns were going hungry, too. Trains had cars that mounted machine guns and cannon. Trucks traveled in convoys with machine-gun-toting command cars. Guerrilla bands shot at them and planted explosives under roads and along railroad tracks anyway. Spartacus’ machine-gun-carrying pickup had done some nasty work driving alongside roads and shooting up trucks that stuck to them.

“What are we going to do next?” Moss asked Spartacus. Back in the USA, he wouldn’t have imagined ever taking orders from a black man. But Spartacus unquestionably led this band. A word from him to his followers and both Moss and Cantarella would die the next instant.

But all he said was, “Don’ know fo’ sho’. Wish to Jesus I did. Best thing I kin think of is to keep on movin’ east. Foraging do seem better over dat way.” He had a Tredegar slung over one shoulder-and a ham slung over the other.

“Not so many Mexicans over that way, neither,” Nick Cantarella said. Moss could follow Cantarella when he spoke. He could follow Spartacus when he spoke, too. Trying to follow one of them on the heels of the other sometimes made him feel he was shifting mental gears too fast for comfort.

“Not yet,” Spartacus said. “Dey hear we’s operatin’ in them parts, though, dey git over there pretty damn quick.”

“Maybe,” Moss said. “But maybe not, too. They aren’t what you’d call eager to mix it up with us.”

“Not their fight,” Cantarella said. “I was them, I wouldn’t want anything to do with a bunch of crazy-ass smokes.”

“Ofays hereabouts make them greasers fight,” Spartacus said. “Make ’em pretend to fight, anyways. How good they aim, how hard they push when they comes after us…Mebbe a different story.”

“Has been so far,” Moss said. Francisco Jose’s soldiers showed no more enthusiasm about being in Georgia than Moss would have shown in the Yucatan. And if peasants in the Yucatan tried to kill him when he came after them, he wouldn’t go after them very hard.

“Big worry is, they’re liable to find an officer with a wild hair up his ass,” Cantarella said. “They get a guy who makes his troops more afraid of him than they are of us, they can give us trouble.”

Before Moss or Spartacus could answer, the guerrillas’ point man waved. Everybody stopped. They were coming out of pine woods into more open, more cultivated country. Or maybe they weren’t coming out. “What’s up?” Spartacus asked in a penetrating whisper.

“Somethin’ don’t look right up ahead,” answered the point man, a small, scrawny, very black fellow named Apuleius.

“Don’t look right how?” Spartacus asked. “What you mean?”

Apuleius shrugged. “Dunno. Too quiet-like, maybe.”

“Reckon somebody’s layin’ for us out there?” Spartacus asked. The point man shrugged again. Spartacus frowned. “Can’t go back or stay here fo’ good,” he said. Nobody argued with him; that was self-evidently true. His frown got deeper. “We gonna have to smoke ’em out, then. I’ll go out, see what they do.”

An Army officer would have sent a private, or several privates, into the open to do the same job. Spartacus led by force of personality, not force of military law. He had to show the men who followed him that he was worth following. That meant exposing himself to danger instead of them.

Out of the woods he sauntered. He left his Tredegar and the ham behind; he might have been a happy-go-lucky Negro without a care in the world. He might have been…if Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party hadn’t made Negroes without a care in the world extinct.

Along with the rest of the band, Moss and Cantarella watched from the woods. Moss knew more than a little relief that Spartacus hadn’t told the two white men to scout what was up ahead. If Mexican soldiers lurked in the fields, their color might have done the trick. But their accents would have betrayed them to Confederates as soon as they opened their mouths.

For a moment, Moss thought Apuleius was flabbling about nothing. Spartacus strolled along, and nobody bothered him. Then a shout rang out, seemingly from nowhere. Like a chipmunk popping out of its hole, a gray-haired Confederate in a gray uniform stood up in what looked like a plain old field of peanuts. He pointed a rifle at Spartacus.

Three other white men appeared and went over to the Negro. One of them held out his hand. Spartacus produced papers. They were more or less genuine; the Negro whose picture was on them even looked something like the guerrilla leader. Spartacus pointed east down the road toward Perry, the closest town.

The whites put their heads together. After a minute or two, they waved for him to pass on. He sketched a salute and walked off in the direction toward which he’d pointed.

Back in the woods, the men he led scratched their heads. “What you reckon we should oughta do now?” one of them asked Nick Cantarella. He wasn’t Spartacus’ second-in-command in any formal sense. But the Negroes recognized that he had a professional’s sense of tactics.

“Now we know where they’re at,” Cantarella said, and the black man nodded. The U.S. officer went on, “We could set up the machine gun over there, say”-he pointed-“and attack from a different angle while they’re trying to take it out.”

“Could work,” the Negro agreed.

“Yeah.” Cantarella nodded. “But it’d make a lot of noise, and probably draw everybody and his goddamn dog over this way. That ain’t good news. Other thing that occurs to me is, we could just sit on our asses here till dark and try and get past this position then. Spartacus’ll be waiting up the road for us somewhere-you can count on that.”

After talking it over in low voices, the guerrillas decided to wait it out. Moss thought that was a good idea. “We can’t send for reinforcements if things go sour,” he said. “There’s a saying-there are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.”

“Makes sense,” Apuleius said. As point man, he recognized the need for caution more than most of the others. If he got bold when he shouldn’t, he’d end up killing himself, and probably a lot of his comrades, too.

They waited under the trees. Midges and the nasty little biting flies the Negroes called no-see-’ems buzzed around. Eventually, the sun sank. As darkness deepened, Cantarella peered east with a pair of field glasses some Mexican officer didn’t need any more. “Fuck me,” he said softly.

“Now what’s wrong?” Jonathan Moss asked.

“They’ve got somebody cute in charge of them,” Cantarella answered. “They aren’t leaving. They’re moving to new positions closer to the road so they can make sure nobody sneaks by. What I wouldn’t give for a mortar right now.”

“Fight our way through?” Moss didn’t like the idea, and he was sure his dislike showed in his voice.

“I don’t want to,” Cantarella said. “Even if we win, it’ll cost us. And it’ll draw more of these militia assholes and Mexican soldiers down on us just like shit draws flies.”

“You say the ofays is by the road?” Apuleius asked. Nick Cantarella nodded. “Is all of ’em there?” the Negro persisted.

“I don’t know for sure, ’cause I don’t know how many of ’em were out there to begin with,” Cantarella said. “But a good many of ’em moved. How come?”

“On account of mebbe I kin git us around ’em in the dark,” Apuleius replied. “Wouldn’t want to try in the daytime. They see us sure. But at night, without no moon…Got a fair chance, anyways.”

“Let’s do it.” Cantarella wasn’t a man to whom hesitation came naturally. “We’ll go in full combat array, ready to fight if we have to, but we’ll sneak if we can.” Then he seemed to remember he wasn’t a U.S. Army captain any more, and couldn’t just give orders. He had much less authority here than Spartacus did. “Is that all right with youse guys?” he asked the guerrillas.

Nobody said no. They got to their feet and shook themselves out into a line from which they could go into action if they needed to. Everyone checked to make sure he had a round chambered and his safety off. Then, as quietly as they could, they left the corner of the pine woods and sneaked left, following Apuleius one man at a time.

The point man found or knew about a track through the fields. A lot of the Negroes were barefoot. They moved as silently as ghosts. Their dark skins also made them harder to spot. Moss, shod and with what didn’t feel like enough dirt on his face and arms, felt conspicuous every time one of his feet came down.

He waited for a shout from near the road, which didn’t seem far away at all. Worse, he waited for a volley from the white men’s rifles, thunder and the lightning of muzzle flashes splitting the night. Those old-timers in gray couldn’t be so blind and deaf…could they?

Maybe they could. Moss spotted a couple of glowing coals in the militiamen’s positions. They were smoking, and they weren’t being careful about it. “Jesus, if I was a fuckin’ sniper…” Cantarella whispered.

Moss didn’t want to say a word, for fear his voice would carry. But he nodded. The same thing had occurred to him. The whites over there should know better. Careless smoking in the trenches got plenty of soldiers killed in the Great War.

No challenge rang out. Nobody fired. None of the guerrillas tripped over his own feet or dropped his weapon or did any of the other simple, deadly things that were all too easy to do. Apuleius led the line back toward the road. If the militiamen had had a deep position…But there weren’t enough of them for that.

Just when Moss thought he was safe, when he could breathe more than tiny sips of air, a human shape loomed out of the darkness ahead. He almost fired from the hip. Then he realized it was Spartacus. “I was hopin’ y’all didn’t run off an’ leave me,” the Negro said dryly.

“Not us. That other gal, she nothin’ but a pretty face,” Apuleius answered. Laughing softly, the guerrillas tramped on through the night.