The Grapple

XIV

Gracchus’ band of black guerrillas kept growing. At first, Cassius thought that was wonderful. Then he noticed how worried the rebel leader looked. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

Gracchus eyed him with something less than joy. “How’m I gonna keep all you sons of bitches fed?” he burst out.

“Oh.” Cassius had no answer for that. He’d eaten well his whole life in Augusta. He’d gone on eating well, or as well as any Negro could, after the Freedom Party enclosed the Terry in barbed wire. Only after he escaped did he discover what living with his belly bumping his backbone was like. A full stomach was better. How his father, his old, fussy, precise father, would have laughed at him for that brilliant discovery! He hoped Scipio, wherever he was, still could laugh. What he hoped and what he feared were very different things.

“Oh,” Gracchus echoed sardonically. “Yeah. You kin say, ‘Oh.’ But you only gots to say it. I gots to do somethin’ about it.”

Cassius paused to fiddle with the sling to his Tredegar. When he first got the rifle, he messed with it all the time, trying to make the nine-pound weight comfortable. Now, as often as not, he forgot he was carrying it. If the sling hadn’t found some way to twist, he wouldn’t have noticed it.

“When I was in the city, I reckoned country niggers lived in these little villages,” he said. “Y’all’d grow your own corn and raise chickens and pigs and like that. An’ I reckoned there’d be plenty o’ vittles.”

“Used to be like dat,” Gracchus said bitterly. “I was a sharecropper. Had me a pot belly-best believe I did.” He was skinny as a snake now, and at least as mean. “Freedom Party git in, they start makin’ all kinds o’ harvesters an’ combines an’ shit. Put all us niggers outa work, fucked them villages like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Got the factories set up so they could make barrels, too,” Cassius said.

“That’s a fact.” Gracchus eyed him. “You ain’t dumb, is you?”

“Me?” Cassius said in surprise. He always thought of himself as pretty dumb. He measured himself against his father-what young man doesn’t? His father, as far as he could tell, knew everything there was to know. He could even talk white, and do it better than most whites could. He’d tried to teach Cassius some of what he knew. Cassius could read and write and cipher. Past that, he hadn’t cared to learn. For the first time, he wondered if he’d made a mistake. It was too late, of course. Life didn’t hand you many second chances. If you were black in the CSA, life didn’t hand you many first chances.

“I ain’t talkin’ about Demosthenes over there,” Gracchus said. Demosthenes was larger than Cassius, stronger than Cassius, braver than Cassius. As far as Cassius could tell, Demosthenes feared nothing and nobody. He was hung like a horse, too. On the other hand, he was so dumb he had to remind himself out loud how to tie his shoes. Gracchus went on, “We need folks who’ll do whatever somebody tells ’em to do, an’ do it right now. Gots to have folks like dat, no two ways about it. But we gots to have people who kin think some, too.”

“Me?” Cassius said again.

“Reckon so,” Gracchus answered. “Next thing we gots to see is if folks jump when you tells ’em to. We fight the damn Mexicans again, you try it. See what happens. Things go good, got us a new officer.”

“Me?” Cassius knew he was starting to sound like a broken record. What he didn’t know was whether he wanted to be an officer. He didn’t like other people ordering him around. His father could speak volumes on that…if he was in a position to speak volumes on anything. Cassius didn’t see why other people would want him ordering them around, either.

But Gracchus had no doubts. From everything Cassius had seen, Gracchus hardly ever had doubts. That was one of the things that made him a leader. “You,” he said now, with a decisive nod. “If you kin do the job, you better step up an’ do it.”

That cut close to the bone. Francisco Jose’s Mexicans had made most unwilling soldiers when they first came to the CSA. Now they seemed to realize they weren’t going home any time soon, and that it was the black guerrillas’ fault. Just as blacks wanted revenge on whites, so the Mexican soldiers wanted revenge on blacks.

And if they didn’t, unconscripted Confederate whites did. The lame, the halt, the old, the very young…Some of them could take rifles out into the field and go after the rebels haunting Georgia. And even the ones who couldn’t served as sentries and guards and did all they could to make life difficult for raiding bands of Negroes-and to fire up the Mexicans so they fought harder, too.

All of which made this march through the central part of the state grim and hungry. Gracchus had scouts out before and behind, to the left and to the right. He knew the guerrillas were hunted, all right. So far, though, they kept slipping through the net.

And how much good does it do? Cassius wondered. He wished he hadn’t thought of the raiders as haunting the Georgia countryside. That made them too much like ghosts of what had been there before, what would never come back to life again. Whites in the towns were real. Everything out here…Well, so what? A lot of town dwellers had to see things that way, anyhow.

But without the countryside, where would the Confederates States get their cotton and peanuts and tobacco, their corn and rice and hogs? Thanks to the Freedom Party and the machinery, the countryside needed far fewer workers to produce its crops than it had ten years earlier. But it still needed some, and it still needed the machines. If farmers and farmworkers got shot, if combines got torched, how was the Confederacy supposed to bring in any kind of harvest at all?

Nobody challenged the guerrilla band as it tramped along a narrow blacktop road. Gracchus probably knew where the fighters were going, but Cassius had no idea. The countryside was a whole different world, and not one where he belonged. He knew every alleyway and corner of the Terry-and much good that ended up doing him. Now he had something new to learn. And he would…if he lived long enough.

Something buzzed overhead. For a second, Cassius thought it was a stupid country bug that didn’t come into cities. Then he saw other guerrillas pointing and heard them swearing. His eyes followed their upraised fingers. The biplane circling up there had been obsolete as a fighting machine since the mid-1920s, if not longer. But it did just fine spotting people who couldn’t shoot it down.

“Goddamn thing,” Gracchus snarled. “Bet your ass some fucker with a wireless set bringin’ sojers down on us.”

That struck Cassius as much too likely. But the biplane pilot had other things in mind, too. He dove on the guerrillas. “Scatter!” three blacks yelled at the same time.

The airplane mounted two machine guns set above the engine and firing through the prop. Cassius could see them winking on and off, on and off, as the pilot fired one short burst after another. Afterwards, he couldn’t have said why he didn’t run like most of the other men. It wasn’t lack of fear. With bullets from the guns cracking past and with others pinging and shrieking as they ricocheted off the paving, he would have been an idiot not to be afraid. Hadn’t Gracchus just called him a smart fellow?

Wounded men screamed to either side of the road. Cassius raised his rifle to his shoulder and fired two shots at the swooping biplane. He knew he wasn’t the only guerrilla shooting at it. But he was sure one of his shots caught the pilot in the chest. He had a good bead on the man, and saw him throw up his arms when he was hit. The biplane never pulled out of the dive, but slammed into the ground less than a hundred yards away.

“Do Jesus!” Cassius exclaimed through the crunching thud of the impact and the roar of the fireball that went up an instant later. “Do Jesus!” Machine-gun rounds in the burning wreck started cooking off, pop! pop! pop!, like firecrackers on the Fourth of July. A bullet snapped past Cassius’ head, as if the pilot were still fighting back from beyond the grave.

“You the one who nailed that ofay asshole?” Gracchus asked, coming out from between the rows of corn that grew to either side of the road.

“Reckon I am,” Cassius answered. Then he coughed. The breeze was blowing back from the downed airplane toward him. It was thick with the smells of burning fabric, burning fuel, hot metal-and charred flesh. He thought that odor would stay with him the rest of his life.

“How come you didn’t run and hide?” the guerrilla leader asked.

“Beats me,” Cassius said honestly. “Just didn’t think to, I guess.”

“Didn’t think to? Didn’t fuckin’ think to?” Gracchus came up and gave him an affectionate clout in the side of the head. “Hope you do some more not thinkin’ real soon now, you hear? You know what the ofays gonna do when they find out you shoot down their fancy airplane? They gonna shit, that’s what.” He clouted Cassius again, which the younger man could have done without. Cassius knew better than to say so.

He looked down at the asphalt around his feet. Bullet scars pockmarked it. The white man in that airplane had done his level best to kill him. One of the bullet marks lay right between his feet. He started to realize just how lucky he was. It didn’t make him feel proud or brave. No, it made him want to shiver instead.

Not everybody was so lucky. The guerrillas were doing what they could for their wounded. What they could do was pitifully little. They could bandage. They could suture-crudely. They could put alcohol or iodine on injuries. If they were desperate enough, they could put ether on a rag and go after a bullet with stolen forceps. Past that…no. Was there a black doctor, a black surgeon, anywhere in the CSA? Cassius didn’t think so. Oh, maybe in New Orleans. People went on and on about what Negroes in New Orleans were supposed to be able to do.

Were there any Negroes, surgeons or otherwise, in New Orleans these days? Or had they all gone to the camps like the rest of Cassius’ family? If they had, would any of them ever come out again?

Cassius feared he knew the answer. He knew it, but he didn’t want to think about it. Thinking about it would have meant thinking about his mother and father and sister.

“We gots to get outa here,” Gracchus said. “Even if that fucker wasn’t on the wireless-an’ he was bound to be, damn him-they gonna come see how come their airplane done crashed.”

“Ambush ’em?” Cassius asked.

Gracchus blinked. He thought. At last, reluctantly, he shook his head. “Don’t reckon we could pull free an’ disappear fast enough afterwards,” he said. “They be on our trail like bloodhounds.” Had he ever read Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Cassius had, though the novel remained banned in the CSA sixty years after the slaves were-allegedly-manumitted. But he didn’t think Gracchus could read at all.

He couldn’t very well argue with the guerrilla leader about the risks. Since he couldn’t, he made himself nod instead. “Whatever you say.”

To a commander, that was always the right answer. Because it was, Gracchus condescended to explain: “This ain’t the Army. I lose my men, I can’t pick up no telephone an’ git mo’. I gots to find ’em, same way I found you. Sometimes I gots to learn ’em to fight, way I learned you. Don’t want to lose ’em. Happens, but I don’t want it to. Want the ofays an’ the Mexicans to lose their bastards instead.”

He’d learned war in a sternly practical school. Cassius knew he himself remained a beginner, even if he was a beginner who’d just luckily aced an important test. He nodded and gave back the magic words once more: “Whatever you say.”

“I say we gets outa here,” Gracchus declared. And they did. If Cassius wished for what might have been…this wasn’t the first time, nor the most urgent. He hurried away with the rest.

Every time Jonathan Moss read in captured papers about U.S. advances deeper into Tennessee, he wanted to head north. When he and Nick Cantarella escaped from Andersonville, he never imagined men in green-gray could penetrate the Confederacy the way the USA’s soldiers were. Jake Featherston’s butternut-clad troops were pushing into western Pennsylvania then, and it hadn’t been clear whether anything or anybody could stop them.

No matter what Moss wanted to do now, his desires ran up against reality in the shape of Spartacus. “Tennessee line still a hell of a long ways from here,” the guerrilla leader said. “Got to git around Atlanta some kinda way if we heads up there. That ain’t country I know.”

“Could you pass us on to an outfit that operates north of you?” Moss asked. “You know, like the Underground Railroad in the old days?”

Spartacus only shook his grizzled head. “Yankee sojers come down here, fine. Till then, I needs you an’ Nick too much to turn loose of you.”

And that was that. The two white men might slip away on their own, but what could they do next? They would be all alone in a country that hated them, all alone in a country where their accents gave them away whenever they opened their mouths. Could they get up to Chattanooga on their own? It seemed unlikely. The only hope for help they had came from other bands of black guerrillas. And would some other band’s chieftain be any more willing to let them go than Spartacus was? One more unlikelihood.

And if Moss and Cantarella got caught trying to slip away, they would forfeit Spartacus’ trust. That wouldn’t be good. That would be about as bad as it could get, in fact. So they didn’t go north. They went east with the guerrillas instead.

They moved mostly by night. More and more often, Confederate authorities-or maybe it was just the locals on their own-put up a barnstormer’s review of antique airplanes during the day to keep an eye out for guerrilla bands. Moss watched the two-deckers from the cover of pine woods with a fierce and terrible longing.

“You could fly one of those fuckers, couldn’t you?” Nick Cantarella asked one day, first making sure no blacks were in earshot.

“In my sleep,” Moss answered at once. “I flew worse junk than that in the Great War-not a lot worse, some of the time, but worse.”

Cantarella looked around again and dropped his voice even lower. “You think we could steal one?”

“You’re reading my mind-you know that?” Moss spoke hardly above a whisper. “I only see one hitch.”

“Yeah? Walking up to the damn thing, hopping in, and flying off?”

Moss paused. “Well, two hitches,” he said sheepishly.

“What’s the other one?”

“From here, we need a full tank of gas to get up to the U.S. line. We run low, we can’t stop at the local Esso station and tank up.”

“Not hardly.” The younger man laughed. Then he sobered again. “So how do we know how much gas is in the son of a bitch we take?”

“I fire up the engine and look at what the fuel gauge says,” Moss answered. “No matter what it says, though, I’ve got to take off after that. This isn’t one of those deals where you can try again if you don’t like what you see.”

“Suits me,” Cantarella said. “Suits me fine. Far as I can tell, we’ve done our duty by these people and then some. Time to do our duty for the US of A, too. And you know what else?”

“Tell me,” Moss urged.

“We got one great big thing going for us when we waltz up to that airplane.” Cantarella waited till Moss made a questioning noise. Then he said, “We’re white. They won’t be looking for ofays”-he grinned when he used the word-“to up and steal a flying machine, not in a month of Sundays they won’t.”

Moss didn’t need to think about that very long before he nodded. “Well, you’re right. Too bad we won’t be able to see the looks on their faces after we take off.”

It sounded so good, so easy, so inevitable, that they overlooked something: they weren’t anywhere near an airstrip. They didn’t come anywhere near one for quite a while, either. Their sole relationship with airplanes was hiding from them.

After a few days, Moss told Cantarella, “You ought to suggest to Spartacus that we go hit an airport so they can’t spy on us so well.”

“I ought to?” The Army officer pointed at him. “What about you?”

“No.” Moss shook his head. “If it comes from you, it’s strategy. He’s used to that. If it comes from me, it’s The pilot wants to get his hands on an airplane. And he’d be right, ’cause I do. Better the other way.”

Whiskers rasped under Cantarella’s fingers as he scratched his chin. “Yeah, that makes sense. I’ll do it,” he said at last. “Don’t know whether he’ll listen to me, but it’s a pretty good shot.”

“A lot depends on how well they guard their airstrips,” Moss said. “If they’re locked up tight, Spartacus won’t want anything to do with them, and how do you blame him? But if he knows one where the locals are asleep at the switch…”

If there was an airstrip like that, Spartacus would know about it. The grapevine worked. Not all Negroes had disappeared from Confederate society-just most of them. There were still cooks and maids and janitors. They heard things. They knew things. And what they heard, what they knew, they managed to pass to guerrilla leaders like Spartacus.

Nick Cantarella planted the seed. He and Moss waited to see if it would bear fruit. While they waited, they tramped along. They couldn’t stay anywhere for more than a couple of days; if they did, they started eating the countryside bare. It seemed bare enough to Moss as things were.

“Got a question,” Spartacus said as they marched through a weary night. “You git your hands on an airplane with machine guns in it, could you shoot at the Confederates with it?”

“As long as I have fuel. As long as I have ammo. As long as the motor keeps working the way it’s supposed to,” Moss said.

“You do it in the nighttime, or you have to wait fo’ daylight?”

“Daylight would be better,” Moss answered. “A lot better. I wouldn’t want to try to land in the dark without good airport lights and without somebody on the wireless talking me down. Night flying’s a whole different ballgame.”

“All right.” Spartacus nodded. “Reckon that means we gots to hit at daybreak, so you kin git the airplane up an’ shoot up the town before you lands it somewhere an’ we gits you out.”

“What town?” Moss asked.

“Name o’ the place is Pineview,” Spartacus said. “We’s about ten miles from there now. They got an airstrip outside-reckon we could swoop down on it.”

“Do you want to do that?”

The guerrilla chieftain nodded. “Any way I kin hurt the ofays, I wants to do it. Strips won’t be guarded much. I’s sure of dat. Ofays don’t know we got us a pilot. They reckon we ain’t nothin’ but a bunch o’ dumb fuckin’ niggers. We show ’em. We fuck ’em good-you’d best believe it.”

Later that day, Nick Cantarella tipped Moss a wink. If Moss hadn’t been looking for it, he never would have noticed. He gave back a discreet thumbs-up.

Spartacus didn’t charge ahead without checking. He sent scouts out under cover of darkness to give the airstrip a once-over. They reported a few strands of barbed wire and some sleepy guards ambling around the perimeter. “We kin take ’em out, then?” Spartacus said.

“Oh, hell, yes, boss,” one of the scouts said. The other black man nodded.

Spartacus smacked his right fist into his cupped left palm. “Let’s go do it, then,” he declared. “We gonna make the ofays shit.” All the colored guerrillas who heard that grinned and clapped and whooped. So did Jonathan Moss and Nick Cantarella. If they had reasons of their own that the Negroes knew nothing about…then they did, that was all.

Since the attack on the airstrip outside of Pineview wouldn’t go in till morning twilight brightened the sky, the guerrillas had plenty of time to grab some sleep early in the evening and deploy as soon as the moon went down. Moss had trouble getting any rest. He was always nervous before missions. Cantarella snored like a buzz saw biting into a knot. If he worried ahead of time, he didn’t show it that way.

Flopped down in the dirt, mud smeared on his face so it wouldn’t show, Moss peered hungrily at the airstrip. There wasn’t much to see: a couple of runways flattened with steamrollers, a couple of old-fashioned airplanes at the end of one of them, a sentry with a limp who patrolled this stretch of barbed wire. Moss knew what wire was supposed to be like. This barely counted for a token effort.

“Let’s go,” Spartacus said. Three men with wire cutters slid forward. The strands of barbed wire parted with soft twangs. The men waved. The rest of the guerrillas loped toward the gaps. Someone shone a flashlight toward the rear. The prize pickup with the machine gun in the bed would be coming, too.

“Halt! Who goes there?” A white man spoke in peremptory tones. When he didn’t get the answer he liked, his rifle barked. Moss saw the muzzle flash. Half a dozen answering shots rang out. The sentry screamed and toppled.

“Come on!” Spartacus shouted. “Ain’t got much time now.”

He was wrong. They had no time at all.

Electric lights blazed on, illuminating the advancing raiders much too well. “Get down!” Nick Cantarella yelled. “It’s a-!” Before he could say trap or ambush or whatever he was going to say, three machine guns opened up and said it for him.

Spartacus’ men were caught out in the open on flat ground at short range. The pickup went up in flames before it even got to the barbed-wire perimeter. Maybe some of the Negroes who’d fed Spartacus information did the same thing for their white bosses. Maybe the whites told them what to feed him. However that worked, the result was a massacre.

Moss hugged the dirt. Bullets cracked past hardly more than a foot over his head. The gunners were shooting low, trying to pick off anything that moved. He couldn’t stay where he was, not if he wanted to stay alive. He crawled toward the pine woods from which the guerrillas had come.

Was somebody with binoculars watching them all the time while they advanced? Moss wouldn’t have been surprised. They’d trusted too much, and they’d walked right into the meat grinder. Somebody behind him screamed. Would anyone get away?

“Spartacus still alive?” Nick Cantarella asked.

“Beats me,” Moss answered. “I’m amazed I’m alive myself.”

“Tell me about it,” Cantarella said. “They fucked us good, the bastards. Talk about a sucker punch…”

“I know,” Moss said mournfully. “I was just thinking that. Are we far enough away so we can get up and run?”

“Go ahead if you want to. Me, I’m staying flat a while longer.”

Moss stayed flat, too. Cantarella knew more about this business than he did. Of course, he’d thought Spartacus knew more about it than he did, too. And he’d been right. But Spartacus didn’t know enough to keep from making a disastrous mistake. Even if the leader survived, his band was a shambles.

By the time Moss reached the woods, his knees and elbows were bloody. But he didn’t get shot, so he was one of the lucky ones. Spartacus made it back, too. “Do Jesus!” he said over and over again, his voice and his face stunned. “Do Jesus! What do we do now?”

“Keep on fighting or try and disappear,” Cantarella said. “Those are your only two choices.”

“How can I fight after this?” Spartacus said. “How? Do Jesus!” Neither white man had any answer for him.

The first thing Flora Blackford did when she got up in the morning was turn on the wireless to find out how the war had gone while she slept. The wireless didn’t always tell the truth; she knew that. In the black days of 1941 and 1942, news reports of Confederate advances often ran days behind what really happened. Losses to enemy bombs were minimized, as were U.S. casualties. The uprisings in Utah and Canada had got short shrift-the one in Canada still did.

But, if you knew how to listen, you could get a pretty good notion of what was going on. Today, for instance, the broadcaster declared, “Confederate air raids over Bermuda are of nuisance value only. The enemy has suffered severe losses in terms of bombers and trained crewmen.”

That was true, but, like a lot of true things, didn’t tell the whole story or even most of it. The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War had had some pungent things to say to the generals and admirals in charge of the reconquest of Bermuda. It was back in U.S. hands, but the whole business had proved much more expensive than anyone expected.

Why hadn’t the generals and admirals figured Confederate bombers would keep paying nighttime visits? It wasn’t stupidity, not exactly. As far as Flora could see, it was more like the blind certainty everything would go fine, and an unwillingness to examine ways in which things might not go fine.

To the men on the low-lying ground who had to put up with bombs coming down on their heads, it probably looked a lot like stupidity even if it wasn’t.

Flora made coffee and scrambled a couple of eggs. They were the only ones she would eat this week. She made a point of sticking to the limits rationing imposed on everybody else. Not all Representatives and Senators did, but she didn’t see how government could force such things on the country without observing them itself. Tomorrow it would be corn flakes or toast and jam. She was low on butter, too, but she couldn’t get more till after the first of the month.

“In Europe,” the newscaster went on, “German wireless reports that the Kaiser’s armored units have driven British forces over the Dutch border. For the first time since the outbreak of war, Germany is free of invaders. British Prime Minister Churchill denies the German claim and insists that strong British counterattacks are imminent.”

How can he do both at once? Flora wondered. But Churchill was formidable, no doubt about it. He’d overshadowed Mosley in the British government, and Britain was overshadowing France in the anti-German alliance, though Action Francaise had held power longer.

“Russia claims the German assault column aimed at Petrograd has been turned back with heavy losses,” the broadcaster continued. “More weight would attach to this claim if the Tsar’s government hadn’t made it repeatedly over the past few weeks, each time without its being true. The situation in the Ukraine, however, remains as confused and chaotic as it has been since the beginning of the war.

“Serbian terrorists have taken credit for the people bomb that exploded in Budapest day before yesterday and killed several prominent Hungarian military officials. The Austro-Hungarian Empire has vowed reprisals.”

Flora sighed as she put salt on her eggs. The cycle of revenge and reprisal was lurching forward another couple of cogs. She saw no end to it. Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Albanians, Macedonians, Bulgarians…Austria-Hungary had security worries that made the USA’s seem simple by comparison.

“In sports…” Flora got up and poured herself another cup of mostly ersatz coffee. She didn’t care about the football scores. Joshua would have, and no doubt still did. But he was off doing his basic training. The apartment seemed empty without him.

Somewhere out in Washington State, scientists were trying to build a bomb that might make soldiers obsolete. With Joshua in uniform, Flora had one more reason to hope they succeeded soon.

And somewhere down in the CSA, other scientists were trying just as hard to build the same damn thing. Flora didn’t think the Confederates could win the war as a slugging match, not any more. But if they got that bomb ahead of the USA…Roosevelt thought the enemy was running behind. Was he right?

The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War couldn’t hold hearings to find out. As far as Flora knew, she was the only committee member who’d ever heard of uranium bombs or understood the difference between U-235 and U-238. There, though, she didn’t know how far she knew. Robert Taft might share the secret. So might any other member. The only way to find out was to ask, and asking meant breaching security. She kept quiet. So did any other members who knew. Maybe it would all come out after the war.

She went downstairs and flagged a cab. They were easy to get on this block, where so many Congressmen and Senators lived. “Where to, ma’am?” the driver asked. In most of Philadelphia, Flora would have been lady, the same as in New York City. This fellow remembered where he was, and took no chances.

“Congressional Hall,” Flora said.

“Yes, ma’am.” He probably thought she was a secretary, but politeness could still be good for his tip.

He had to detour from the shortest route a couple of times. Sawhorses and ropes blocked the street. Signs said, BOMB DAMAGE. “Do you know what’s going on?” Flora asked. “I didn’t hear any bombers overhead last night.”

“Neither did I, ma’am,” the cabby agreed. “But I heard one of ’em was an auto bomb and the other one was a people bomb.”

“Oy!” Flora said. “Has anyone claimed responsibility? Confederates? Mormons who don’t want to give up? Canadians?”

“God only knows,” he said. “You can walk along minding your own…darn business, and out of the blue-kaboom!”

“Out of the blue makes it worse,” Flora said, and the driver nodded. When someone said he’d planted an auto bomb, when a group proclaimed that one of its members hated you enough to blow himself to red mist to hurt you, at least you knew why you’d been injured. When the question hung in the air…When the question hung in the air, what could you do but stay afraid all the time? Flora didn’t think the cabby had several hundred pounds of TNT in the trunk of his beat-up Packard or under the floorboards, but she couldn’t prove he didn’t. And he couldn’t know she hadn’t strapped an explosive belt around her waist. Scary times, all the way around.

As if to prove as much, concrete barricades kept motorcars from getting too close to Congressional Hall. Flora paid the driver. The Packard wheezed away. She approached the building. Despite her status, despite her Congressional ID, security guards went through her handbag and attache case. A hard-faced policewoman patted her down. She’d got complaints that some of the women who frisked other women enjoyed themselves as much as men would have. She didn’t know what anyone could do about that. This one seemed all business. “You can go on,” she said when she finished.

“Thank you so much,” Flora said. The sarcasm rolled off the policewoman like rain off a tin roof.

Her secretary was in the office before Flora got there. “Good morning, Congresswoman,” she said. “Coffee’s just about ready.”

“Thanks, Bertha. It smells good,” Flora said. “Isn’t it terrible about the bombs this morning?”

“I should say so,” Bertha answered. “I hear the people bomb was one of those horrible Mormons.”

“Was it? How do they know?” Flora asked.

“I don’t know, but I’d believe anything about those people,” her secretary said. “They caused us so much trouble, so much misery-why wouldn’t they go on doing it even now?”

That wasn’t evidence. It wasn’t anything even close to evidence. Flora knew as much, even if Bertha didn’t. The cease-fire in Utah was holding…mostly. But there were Mormons who weren’t ready to give up the fight against the government that had spent a lifetime abusing them. Some didn’t care if they lived or died. The United States were painfully learning that men or women who didn’t value their own lives were the hardest kind of foes to stop.

“What are my appointments this morning?” Flora already knew most of them, but Bertha couldn’t go on ranting about Mormons if she had to check.

“Senator Taft called a few minutes ago and said he’d like to come by,” she answered. “I told him it was all right. I hope that wasn’t wrong?” She didn’t like making mistakes, which made her a good secretary. Flora had known some who just didn’t give a damn one way or the other.

She nodded now. “I’m always glad to see Senator Taft,” she said. They disagreed politically more often than not-they disagreed on almost everything, in fact, except that Jake Featherston needed suppressing. But they had an odd, acrid friendship, each knowing the other was sincere and honest. Flora went on, “Did he say what it was about?”

“Not to me, he didn’t.” Bertha sniffed. “Like a secretary should know what was going on? Noooo.” She stretched the word out into a long sound of complaint.

“All right. I’ll find out when he gets here.” Flora carefully didn’t smile.

Robert Taft came in about twenty minutes later. “Good morning, Flora,” he said. He was only half the man his father had been-literally. He was lean and spare, where William Howard Taft had been wide as a football field. William Howard Taft had been deceptively clever, a good mind darting out from that vast bulk. There was nothing deceptive about Robert Taft’s cool, dry, piercing intelligence.

“Good morning.” Flora brought him a cup of coffee-he would have done the same for her in his office. “What can I do for you today?” She was sure he wanted her to do something; he didn’t waste time on social calls. His father, who’d lived up to the cliches about fat men, had been far more outgoing.

Sure enough, Robert Taft went straight to business: “I want your support for the measure readmitting Kentucky and Tennessee to the United States.”

“Do you really think the time is ripe?” Flora asked. “We don’t hold all of either one-we don’t hold most of Tennessee. I know some white people in Kentucky really are pro-USA. But in Tennessee, we’d only have Negroes to work with, and how many has Jake Featherston left alive?”

“Some Tennessee whites will work with us. You can always find front men,” Taft said, which was probably true. “But the real reason for readmitting them is to show that we aim to end this war by ending the Confederate States, and that Featherston can’t stop us. That was the rationale for reviving Houston, too. And the more states we take back, the more states that fall out of the Confederacy, the more political pressure we put on Richmond. How long will the Confederate people and the Confederate Army go on backing a loser?”

“These U.S. states would be shams-and they’d elect Democrats, not Socialists,” Flora said. “Isn’t that part of what you have in mind?”

“We can work out an arrangement like the one we used in Utah, if that’s what’s troubling you,” Taft said. “As long as they stay under martial law, they don’t vote in national elections. You won’t see the House and Senate swamped with undesirables.” He smiled a wintry smile.

Flora considered. A deal like that only put off the evil day. But it was liable to put off the day for a long time, because no Confederate state would be reconciled to returning to the USA any time soon. Anyone who remembered the interwar histories of Kentucky and Houston knew that. She found herself nodding. “I think we have a deal,” she said.

“Here you are, Mr. President.” Lulu set the latest pile of wireless intercepts and press clippings from the USA on Jake Featherston’s desk.

“Thank you kindly,” he said, and put on his reading glasses to go through them. He never let himself be photographed wearing the damned things, but without them print was just a blur these days.

He waited till Lulu left his underground office before he started swearing. She didn’t like it. He could cuss out his generals, but he wouldn’t swear in front of his secretary. That was crazy, but it was how things worked. Of course, he couldn’t stand most of his generals, and he liked Lulu. Keeping her happy mattered to him.

But he had plenty to cuss about. The damnyankees, now that they’d grabbed the ball, showed no signs of wanting to let go of it. Jake shook his head in furious wonder. That wasn’t how things were supposed to work. The Confederate States were supposed to jump on the United States with both feet and never let them up again. Jake had intended to make the CSA the dominant country in North America. What he’d intended and what was going on…didn’t turn out to be the same thing, dammit.

The damnyankees were methodically building up in Tennessee, the same way they’d built up north of the Ohio before slamming down into the Confederacy. The counterattack through the mountain gaps into their flank hadn’t fazed them. Featherston muttered in profane discontent as he shook his head. The counterattack hadn’t fazed them much. Without it, they might already be in Chattanooga. Even so, they were gloating about how far they had come.

They were gloating about how well things were going in what they called Houston, too. Part of that was thumbing their noses because they’d revived the state that everyone who lived in it hated. Part of it was a threat; a U.S. officer out there said, “Before too long, we hope to shut down the Confederates’ murder factory near Snyder.”

“Fuck you, asshole,” Featherston growled. That hit him where he lived. Getting rid of the CSA’s Negroes was at least as important as putting the United States in their place, as far as he was concerned. If the Yankees thought they could stop him, they would have to think again.

He made a note to himself to talk to Ferdinand Koenig about that. Before he could do anything about the note, Lulu stuck her head in again and said, “Major General Patton is here to see you, sir.”

“Send him in,” Jake said. Lulu nodded and withdrew.

Patton came in wearing what was practically dress uniform, with medals hanging on his chest in two rows. That wasn’t the way to make Jake Featherston love him. Not that Jake had anything against courage, but he had everything in the world against show-off officers.

Patton’s salute could have come straight out of VMI, too. The holsters on his belt were empty, though; the President’s guards had his pistols. “Mr. President,” he said in his gravelly voice.

“Sit down, General.” Featherston waved Patton to a chair. When Patton had taken his seat, Jake fixed him with his stoniest glare. “You didn’t give me what I needed, General. You didn’t give the country what it needed. What have you got to say for yourself, eh?”

“Two things, sir,” Patton replied. “First is, if you’re not satisfied with me, put in someone you like better and stick me in a penal battalion. I’ll fight for the Confederate States any way you please. Second thing is, whoever you put in my place will have as much trouble succeeding as I did unless we can get some air cover. My men were naked under the sky, and they paid a dreadful price for it.”

Featherston stared at Patton again, this time sourly. The high and mighty general had just taken much of the wind out of his sails. Anyone who volunteered for a penal battalion…Those outfits were made up of officers and men who’d disgraced themselves one way or another. Commanders threw them in wherever the fighting was hottest. Soldiers who redeemed themselves could earn their old rank back. Most of the poor damned bastards ended up as casualties instead. They were there to end up as casualties, and with luck, to help the cause a little before they did.

“I goddamn well ought to throw you in a penal battalion,” Jake growled, but even he could hear his heart wasn’t fully in it.

“Do whatever you need to do, Mr. President. I’ll go.” Patton was nearly as stubborn as Jake was himself.

“I’ll get more mileage out of you if I keep you in command.” Featherston didn’t like that conclusion, but he’d had to deal with a lot of things he didn’t like lately. “Can you hold Chattanooga?”

“I can try,” Patton answered. “If they mass enough force to outweigh us six to one or something like that, though, I don’t know how I’ll manage it. I’m a better than decent general, sir, but I don’t work miracles.”

“Will you fight house by house and block by block, make those damnyankee sons of bitches pay the way we paid in Pittsburgh?”

“Yes, sir.” Patton didn’t hesitate. In that, too, he was like the President of the CSA.

“All right, then. Go do it,” Featherston said. It wasn’t all right, or anywhere close to all right, but Jake came from the school that didn’t believe in showing where it hurt. Anything that gave anyone a grip on you was to be avoided.

Patton rose and saluted again. “You won’t be sorry, sir. Or if you are, I’ll be too dead to know about it.” Without waiting for a reply, he did a smart about-turn and marched out of the office: a procession of one.

“I’m already sorry,” Jake muttered. He was sorry he had to use an attacking general to defend. He was sorry he had to defend so deep inside the Confederacy. He’d planned to fight this war almost entirely on U.S. soil. Well, what was life but the difference between what you planned and what you got?

He walked to the door and asked Lulu, “Who’s next?”

“General Potter, Mr. President.” She sniffed. She didn’t like Clarence Potter-mostly because Jake Featherston didn’t like him.

Jake hid a smile. That was about as funny as anything he had going on these days. But like Potter or not, the President knew he was useful. “Send him in.”

“Yes, sir.” Lulu sighed.

Although Jake felt like sighing, too, he didn’t, not around Potter. He didn’t trust the Intelligence officer enough to show that he didn’t enjoy his company. All he said after the usual formalities was, “Being in the line isn’t as easy as it looks, is it?”

“No, sir. It’s like juggling knives when someone’s shooting at your feet,” Potter answered. “Maybe experience helps. I hope to God it does, anyway. I’ve got a little now-the hard way. They were grabbing for anybody they could find with wreaths on his collar, and they tapped me. I gave it my best shot. What else could I do?”

“Go out there and kick those Yankees’ asses?” Featherston suggested, not at all sardonically.

“Sir, I would have loved to,” Potter said. “But we hardly even got to the front, let alone fought there. U.S. air power chewed us to pieces coming through the gaps-slowed us down, gave us casualties, tore the crap out of our trucks and armor. We wouldn’t have been in good shape even if we had done more fighting. We need more airplanes and more pilots.”

“We need more of everything, goddammit,” Jake said.

“Yes, sir. We do.” With four words, Potter skewered every Freedom Party policy-every policy of Jake Featherston’s-at least as far back as the President’s first inauguration. And Featherston couldn’t do one damn thing about it, because all the cross-grained Intelligence officer had done was agree with him.

In lieu of snarling at him for agreeing, Jake asked, “Were you able to keep putting Professor FitzBelmont’s feet to the fire while you were in the field?”

“By messenger, yes, sir,” Potter answered. “It meant letting one more man in on the secret, but Chuck doesn’t blab. And I figured that was better than doing it by telephone or wire or letter. With a messenger in the know, I could really speak my mind.”

“Fair enough,” Jake said. “FitzBelmont’s got to know how bad we need that bomb, and how important it is for us to get it before the United States do.” If the Confederate States got uranium bombs ahead of the USA and kept on getting more of them, shortages of everything else-even airplanes, even manpower-would stop mattering. If the CSA had uranium bombs and the USA didn’t, the Confederacy would damn well win.

“If he doesn’t know, it’s not because he hasn’t been told,” Potter said. “I believe he’s doing everything he knows how to do. I believe he’s the best man we’ve got for the slot, too. Whatever else he is, he’s bright.”

“What about the men the damnyankees have?” Featherston asked. “Have you worked out some kind of way to hit ’em up in Washington again?”

“If we can land a mortar team by submersible, it might be able to get close enough to shell their operation,” Potter said. “I’m not sure how far out their ground perimeter extends. I don’t think we can hit them from the air again. They’re alert for that now. A lot of things you can do once, chances are you can’t do ’em twice. The ground operation would be a suicide run, too, chances are.”

“Yeah, chances are,” Jake agreed. “Either you get dedicated people who don’t care or you don’t tell ’em beforehand how dangerous the mission is. Both ways work.”

“If I can, I’ll use people who know what they’re doing and are willing to do it anyhow,” Potter said. “I don’t like sending people off to die when they don’t know that’s in the cards.”

“If you can, fine. But if you can’t, do it the other way. Don’t get thin-skinned on me, Potter,” Jake said. “This country is in trouble. If blasting the crap out of the U.S. uranium factory helps get us out of trouble, we do it. Period. We do it. You got that?”

“Oh, yes, Mr. President. I’ve got it. You’re always very plain about what you want.” Clarence Potter spoke respectfully. He spoke obediently. How, then, did he make Jake feel as if he’d just got slapped in the face? He had all kinds of unpleasant talents.

Jake held up a hand. “One other thing I need to find out. Any sign the Yankees know where our uranium works is at?”

“Sir, the first sign of that you’d get would be every U.S. bomber ever built coming straight at Washington University with the heaviest load of bombs it could carry,” Potter answered.

He was bound to be right. And he was serious, too; when he talked about the Confederate uranium-bomb project, the subtle mockery disappeared from his voice. He was a Confederate patriot. Jake Featherston used that button to keep him loyal to the Freedom Party-and loyal to the President of the CSA, too. If Potter ever separated Jake Featherston’s cause from the Confederacy’s…If that ever happens, I’ve got to get rid of him, because then he turns as dangerous as a rattler in my bed, Jake thought. I’d better keep a closer eye on him.

None of his thoughts showed on his face. All he said was, “You’re doing a good job of keeping the secret, then. Thanks. That’s one more thing the country needs.”

“Yes, sir.” Again, Potter sounded brisk and assured. But he couldn’t resist one more gibe: “We’d be further along now if FitzBelmont got funding sooner.”

“Oh, give me a break!” Jake exclaimed-that rubbed him the wrong way. “He came to me with this blue-sky story an idiot dog wouldn’t believe. So maybe it’ll turn out to be true. I hear a dozen blue-sky stories every day, and damn near all of ’em are nothing but shit. Would you have believed this one way back then?”

Potter pursed his lips. “Well, no,” he admitted-he was almost compulsively honest. “But somebody made the United States believe it. I wonder how that happened.”

“The United States follow the Germans wherever they go-maybe that’s got something to do with it,” Jake said. “I wonder how far along England and France are. Got any ideas?”

“No, Mr. President. They aren’t talking to me.”

“To me, neither,” Jake snarled. “They reckon I’m a poor relation. Well, when we get this here bomb, I’ll show ’em who’s a poor relation to who, by God. See if I don’t. The whole damn world’ll see if I don’t.”

Jefferson Pinkard heard the distant boom of artillery off to the northwest. He’d heard it before, but only as a rumble on the edge of audibility. Now it was louder and more distinct than he’d ever known it. That meant only one thing: the damnyankees were closer to Camp Determination than they’d ever got before.

When Pinkard called the local commander to complain, Brigadier General Whitlow Ling said, “If you want to put your guards under my command and send ’em off to the front here, I’ll listen to you. Otherwise, butt out of my business.”

“I can’t do that,” Jeff said.

“Then butt out of my business,” the Army man said firmly.

“But Camp Determination is important to the whole country,” Jeff said.

“And I’m doing every damn thing I know how to do to keep the U.S. Eleventh Army away from it,” Ling said. “If you think you’re helping when you joggle my elbow, you’d better think twice, ’cause it ain’t so.”

“We set up this camp way the hell out here so the Yankees couldn’t get at it,” Pinkard said. “We’ve got important business to take care of here.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Ling said. “All I know is, General Dowling has more men than I do. He has a better logistics train than I do. He has a fuck of a lot more airplanes than I do. You want miracles, go talk to Moses.”

“So don’t fight him straight up,” Jeff said. “Go around him.”

“And how am I supposed to do that, when Richmond won’t give me the barrels I need?” Brigadier General Ling seemed sure the camp commandant wouldn’t have an answer for him.

But, thanks to the newspapers and magazine, Jeff did. “Load machine guns and cannons onto a bunch of trucks and go raiding,” he said. “The Canucks are doing it to the USA. Hell, the damn niggers in Georgia and Mississippi are doing it to us. Can we fight as smart as a bunch of coons? Hope to God we can.”

Had he laid that on too thick? Would Ling hang up on him instead of listening? If Ling thought he could get away with that, he had another think coming, because Jeff would get on the horn to Ferdinand Koenig. If the Attorney General couldn’t make a mere soldier say uncle, Jeff was backing the wrong horse.

Ling didn’t hang up. He said, “You want us to turn guerrilla, then?”

“I don’t care what you call it, General,” Pinkard answered. “I want you to make the damnyankees stop. I want you to make ’em go backwards. I don’t give a rat’s ass how you do it. Here’s something you haven’t tried, that’s all. It’s worked good some other places. What have you got to lose?”

He waited. “It wouldn’t be that expensive,” Ling said in musing tones. “Wouldn’t cost that many men, wouldn’t cost that much materiel. Might be worth a shot.”

“Anything’s worth a shot right now, wouldn’t you say?” Jeff answered.

Ling only grunted. That was probably as it should be. A soldier wouldn’t admit his side was in trouble, even if it was-maybe especially if it was. If he hurt the troops’ morale, what would that do? Cause his side more trouble still. “We’ll see what happens,” Ling said at last, and he did hang up.

“Hooked him, by God,” Jeff said happily as he set down his own telephone. “I do believe I hooked him.” He hadn’t been sure he could.

He looked out through his window at the men’s half of Camp Determination. A long queue of Negroes waited to go into the bathhouse and delousing station. They would go in, all right, but they wouldn’t come out again-not breathing, anyhow. Guards with submachine guns flanked them to either side, to make sure nobody did anything stupid or desperate. Right this minute, everything seemed calm.

The camp was busier than it had been for a while, too. U.S. bombers had eased up on the railroad line leading into Camp Determination. They still hit it every so often, but repairs stayed ahead of damage now. And they’d eased up on Snyder, too. Pinkard thanked God for that. He had his family to worry about, and it mattered more to him than anything else in the world.

As much as he hated to do it, he’d just about decided to send Edith and her boys back to Louisiana. Maybe he would have looked at things differently if she weren’t expecting. But Alexandria was safe in a way Snyder wasn’t. Even though it also had a camp nearby, the United States were in no position to bomb it. If they brought bombers south, they wouldn’t bother with a half-assed target like Alexandria. They’d go and unload on New Orleans, which really mattered.

Jeff watched the queue snake forward. Everything went smoothly. He’d set it up so everything would, but seeing that it did still made him feel good. It wasn’t a guarantee these days. A year ago, all the Negroes who went through the camp believed the guards when they said the bathhouses and the trucks were just procedures to be put up with as they got transferred somewhere else. Not now. The blacks brought out of colored districts and the captured Red guerrillas had a pretty good idea of what went on here. Jeff blamed damnyankees propaganda for that. It made Camp Determination harder to run, because the inmates understood they had nothing to lose.

He breathed a silent sigh of relief when the last Negro moved through the barbed-wire gate and into the bathhouse. That meant he could go back to his paperwork with a clear conscience. It never went away, and it was the part of the job he hated most. He hadn’t signed up to be a bureaucrat. He’d signed up to do things, by God. But you couldn’t just do things, not in the CSA you couldn’t. You had to keep records to show you’d done them, too.

And you had to keep records about things that went wrong. He’d just sent away two more guards from the women’s side for having lesbian affairs with the prisoners, and one male guard who’d got caught cornholing colored boys. Those involuntary separations required a mountain of forms. You couldn’t just fire somebody for something like that. You almost had to catch people in the act, because those accusations could ruin somebody’s life.

One of the women was raising a stink. She denied everything on a stack of Bibles. Jeff didn’t care. He had witnesses to prove she’d been carpet-munching. That was dirty enough when a man did it to a woman (though Pinkard sure didn’t complain when Edith went down on him-oh, no!). When another woman did it, it was about as disgusting as cornholing. This gal had to go, and she would.

She’ll probably end up a girls’ gym teacher, someplace where word of this hasn’t spread, Jeff thought. Under the Freedom Party, records were a lot more thorough and complete than they had been back in the old days, but they weren’t perfect, not by a long shot.

He’d just signed the last of the papers that would get rid of the dyke when air-raid sirens started wailing and airplane engines droned overhead. A minute or so later, the antiaircraft guns around Camp Determination thundered into action. In the camp compound, he watched guards hastily don helmets. Falling shrapnel could cave in a man’s skull.

The colored prisoners, of course, had no helmets. Jeff only shrugged. That wasn’t his worry. If one of the smokes got clobbered, well, so what? It only meant he was buying his plot a little sooner than he would have otherwise.

A thunderous explosion rattled the window in his office. It was safety glass reinforced with chicken wire, but it almost blew out anyhow. That wasn’t a bomb going off. That was a bomber crashing, and its whole load blowing up at once. The gunners didn’t nail very many, but every once in a while they came through.

Prisoners in the yard were pointing up in the sky at the bomber stream. They were cheering and dancing and urging the damnyankees on. Rage ripped through Pinkard. How dared they root for the other side? They deserved everything they were catching, all right. Whether they would have cheered for the United States if they weren’t catching hell from the Confederate States never once crossed his mind.

Not surprising, not when he had other, more important, things to worry about. The bombers started unloading on Snyder again. More antiaircraft guns protected the towns, but flak alone couldn’t keep bombers away. If the Confederacy had some fighters of its own in the air…

But the Confederacy damn well didn’t. Basically, Snyder had to sit there and take it. I will get Edith and the boys back to Alexandria, so help me God I will, Jeff thought. If the damnyankees were going to bomb innocent civilians…Again, he didn’t dwell on what the Confederates had done to innocent civilians on the other side of the border, let alone on what the men he commanded were doing to civilians right here in this camp.

He hated those strings of boom! boom! boom!, one right after another. Sure, Edith and Willie and Frank would be down in the storm cellar. Sure, it would take a direct hit to harm them. The odds against that were long. But it could happen, as he knew too well. And he couldn’t do one damn thing about it. He hated that even more.

Here inside Camp Determination, he was safe as houses. The Yankees had never bombed the camp. They cared more about the worthless niggers inside it than they cared about the honest white people they were trying to murder.

Another bomber exploded. This one sounded as if it blew up in midair. The United States were paying for things today, anyhow. Sometimes the bombers got off scot-free. That was just plain embarrassing. At least the gunners weren’t standing around with their thumbs up their asses.

Jeff knew losing a few bombers wouldn’t keep the USA from coming back. He also knew how helpless he was to do anything about it. What choice did he have but wait here till the raid ended and then go back to Snyder and see if he still had any family left?

None. None at all.

Bombers stayed above Snyder for most of an hour. As soon as the bombs stopped falling, Jeff jumped into the Birmingham that was his to use. He didn’t wait for a driver, but gunned the engine to life and roared off to find out if his family was all right.

He had to go off the road and onto the shoulder a couple of times to avoid craters. He was glad it hadn’t rained any time lately, or his auto might have bogged down. But the fires rising from Snyder made him mutter and curse and pray, all in a confused jumble. He knew what he meant, but he doubted anybody else, even God, would have.

Once he got into Snyder, he had to make more detours, both because of holes in the streets and because of burning buildings. The bombs hadn’t smashed the town’s one fire engine. Its bell clanged like the shrieks of a lost soul as it raced from one disaster to the next. How much good could it do at each stop? Some, maybe.

Jeff’s heart was in his throat when he turned onto his street. A house half a block in front of his had taken a direct hit. Part of a body lay on the front lawn. Pinkard gulped and looked away.

But there were Edith and Frank and Willie. His wife was bandaging a neighbor lady who looked to have been cut by flying glass. His stepsons watched with more interest than horror. They’d seen things like this before. Kids got used to war and other disasters faster than grownups did. For them, it soon became routine.

For Jeff…“Thank God you’re all right!” he called as he sprang from the motorcar and ran over to Edith.

“This was a bad one, but we made it into the cellar quick as we could. The windows are already cardboard and plywood, so we didn’t lose any glass. I don’t smell gas. The power’s out, but it’ll come back.” As Edith talked, she went on bandaging the neighbor lady’s head. “There you go, Vera. It’s not too deep, and I don’t think the scar will be bad.”

“Thank you, Edith.” With middle-class politeness, Vera nodded to Jeff. “Hello, Mr. Pinkard. Sorry we have to run into each other like this. It’s a miserable war, isn’t it?”

“It sure is, ma’am.” Jeff coughed on the smoke in the air. He shook his fist toward the west. “It’s a miserable war, but by God we’ll win it.”

Cabo San Lucas wasn’t quite the ass end of nowhere, but you could see it from there. George Enos knew damn well he wasn’t any place he wanted to be. As usual, nobody in the Navy bothered asking his opinion. The Marines had taken the place away from the Empire of Mexico. U.S. Army troops were pushing down from San Diego to occupy the rest of Baja California. The godawful terrain and the heat and the lack of water were giving them more trouble than Francisco Jose’s soldiers were.

Also annoying, or worse than annoying, to the men in green-gray and forest green were air raids across the Gulf of California from Confederate Sonora. C.S. bombers struck by night, when they were harder for U.S. fighters to find and shoot down. The Confederacy didn’t keep a lot of airplanes in Sonora, but the ones they had did what any small force was supposed to do: they made the other side hate their guts.

And they were the reason the Townsend lingered by Cabo San Lucas. More and more escort carriers came down the coast of Baja California. Sooner or later, they’d try to force their way into the Gulf of California and put C.S. air power in Sonora out of business. When they did, they would need escorts to deal with Confederate and Mexican surface raiders and submersibles. That was what destroyers were for.

“This would go quicker if we got a couple of fleet carriers instead of all these chickenshit little baby flattops,” George grumbled. “An escort carrier isn’t big enough to hold many airplanes, and the damn things can’t make twenty knots if you throw ’em off a cliff.”

Fremont Dalby gave him the horselaugh. “Now tell me another one,” he said. “Like they’re gonna waste fleet carriers down here. Fast as we build more of ’em, they go into the Atlantic. It’s just like last time: we cut off England’s lifeline to Argentina and Brazil, we screw her to the wall.”

“Yeah,” George said. That was what the father he barely remembered was doing in 1917, and how the senior George Enos died after the CSA threw in the sponge.

Dalby didn’t notice George was feeling subdued. “Maybe-maybe-the Sandwich Islands get one,” he said. “Depends on how serious we are about going after the Japs.”

“Makes sense, I guess,” George said. “If it’s up to me, though, we wait till we’re done with the really important stuff, and then we kick their scrawny yellow asses.”

“That’s how I’d do it, too,” Dalby agreed. “’Course, that doesn’t mean it’s how the admirals will want to handle it. Expecting the brass to do shit that makes sense is like expecting a broad to understand if you screw around on her. You can expect it, yeah, but that don’t mean it’s gonna happen. Like for instance, you know what I heard?”

“I’m all ears,” George said.

“You’d look even funnier than you do now if you were, and that’s saying something,” Dalby told him, altogether without malice. George flipped the gun chief the bird. Since Dalby was ribbing him personally, he could get away with that. Had the conversation had anything to do with duty or the ship, he would have had to take whatever abuse the older man dished out. Dalby went on, “Anyway, scuttlebutt is they’re keeping a flotilla bigger’n this one off the northwest coast, near where the Columbia lets out into the Pacific. Carriers, escorts, subs, the whole nine yards.”

“That’s pretty crazy,” George said. “Why would they put so many ships up where they don’t do any good?”

Fremont Dalby shrugged and lit a cigarette. He held out the pack to George, who took one, too. After a couple of puffs, Dalby said, “It’s almost like they’re guarding that whole stretch of coast, like there’s something up there they don’t want the Japs to hit no matter what.”

“What could there be?” George asked. “They think the Japs’ll bomb the salmon-canning plants, or what?”

“Beats me,” Dalby said. “Like I told you, this is all scuttlebutt. Maybe it’s just a cloud of stack gas, but the guys I heard it from say it’s the straight skinny.”

“Something’s going on that we don’t know about,” George said.

Dalby gave him exaggerated, silent applause. “No kidding, Sherlock,” he said. George laughed. Maybe it would all make sense after the war was over. Maybe it would never make sense. Some of the dumb stunts the brass pulled were like that, too.

The Townsend was one of the lead escorts when a flotilla centered on three escort carriers steamed into the Gulf of California. The flotilla had minesweepers along, too, in case the Confederates and Mexicans had surprises waiting for any newcomers. George would have if he were waiting for trouble from the USA.

“Tell me about it,” Dalby said when he worried out loud. “Mines are simple, mines are cheap, mines’ll blow your sorry ass sky-high if you hit one. What more could anybody want from the fuckers?”

They didn’t hit any mines the first day inside the gulf. On the second morning, klaxons hooted the men to general quarters. “Now hear this! Now hear this! Aircraft approaching from the northeast! Aircraft approaching from the northeast!”

Fighters zoomed off the baby flattops’ decks. From what George had heard, Confederate Asskicker dive bombers were great when they operated unopposed, but they were sitting ducks for fighters. He didn’t know if what he’d heard was the gospel, but had the feeling he’d find out pretty damn quick.

Confederate fighters escorted the dive bombers. Up till recently, land-based aircraft were always hotter than their carrier counterparts, which needed heavier airframes to stand up to the stresses of catapult-aided takeoffs and landings cut short by tailhooks and arrester wires. But the latest U.S. carrier-based fighters were supposed to be as tough and fast as anything in the air.

An airplane tumbled down toward the sea. Fremont Dalby had a pair of binoculars. “That’s an Asskicker!” he said. “Got the fixed landing gear and flies with its wings going up on either side like a goddamn turkey buzzard.”

Another airplane plummeted. “Who’s that?” Fritz Gustafson asked.

“Dunno,” Dalby answered. “I think it was one of ours, though. They’ve got blunter noses than C.S. Hound Dogs do.”

Two more machines fell out of the sky, both burning. Keeping track of who was doing what to whom got harder and harder. The rolling, roiling fight drew ever closer to the flotilla.

“Here we go.” At Fremont Dalby’s orders, the gun layers swung the twin 40mm mount toward the closest Confederate airplane. George Enos passed Fritz Gustafson two shells and got ready to give him more. Dalby put the guns exactly where he wanted them and opened fire.

Casings leaped from the breeches. George fed shells as fast as he could. Thanks to Gustafson’s steady hands, the twin 40mms devoured them just as fast. Black puffs of smoke appeared all around the oncoming C.S. bombers and fighters. All the other guns on the Townsend were blasting away, too: not just the 40mm mounts but the dual-purpose five-inch main armament and the.50-caliber machine guns that were stationed wherever the deck offered a few feet of space. The noise was terrific, impossible, overwhelming.

“Got one!” Everybody at George’s mount yelled the same thing at the same time. George couldn’t be sure a shell from one of his guns hit the Hound Dog, but he thought so. The fighter pilot tried to crash his airplane into the destroyer, but fell short-he went into the drink about a quarter of a mile off the port bow.

George never saw the Asskicker that hit the Townsend till too late.

One second, he was passing shells as fast as he could. The next, altogether without knowing what had happened, he was flying through the air with the greatest of ease, like the daring young man on the flying trapeze. Unlike the daring young man, he didn’t have a trapeze. He didn’t have a net, either. The Gulf of California reached up and smacked him in the face and in the gut. If his wasn’t the worst bellyflop of all time, he surely got no lower than the bronze medal.

At least the water was warm. He didn’t swallow too much of it. His life vest kept him from sinking. He looked up just in time to watch a C.S. Mule zoom off not far above the waves. Dalby was right-with those uptilted wings, the damn thing was as ugly as a turkey vulture.

It made a much better killing machine, though.

He didn’t realize what had happened to the Townsend till he looked back at his ship. Before that, he thought whatever happened to him was some sort of private accident-though how a private accident could have hurled him close to a hundred yards was anything but obvious. He slowly decided he wasn’t thinking very well at all.

But he didn’t need to be a genius to see the destroyer was history. Her back was broken. Smoke billowed from her. The Gulf of California all around her was full of sailors, some with their heads out of the water and paddling, others facedown and still and dead.

“Holy Jesus!” George blurted. “We got nailed.” That was, if anything, an understatement. Even as he watched, the Townsend settled lower in the water. She wouldn’t stay afloat much longer.

But George only thought he was afraid till he saw gray dorsal fins knifing through the water. He’d watched sharks from the destroyer’s deck. That was fine. Watching them from the sea with a free-lunch course spread out all around…George crossed himself. The Ave Maria he blurted out might not help, but it sure couldn’t hurt.

He looked around not just for sharks but also for his buddies. He didn’t see Fremont Dalby anywhere. A big blond body floated not far away. Was that Fritz? George didn’t paddle over to see. He didn’t want to know that bad.

Fuel oil spread from the stricken destroyer. George swam away from it. That stuff would kill you if you swallowed it. He’d seen as much in the Sandwich Islands. His voice rose with others, calling for nearby ships to pick them up.

The minesweeper that had led the flotilla swung back toward the Townsend, whose deck was almost awash now. When the destroyer went down, her undertow dragged luckless sailors too close by under with her. George had got too far away for that to happen to him. But someone not nearly far enough from him screamed. Dorsal fins converged as red spread through the deep blue. George rattled off more Hail Marys, and an Our Father for good measure.

A life ring attached to a line splashed into the sea maybe fifty yards off. He swam over and put it on. Sailors aboard the minesweeper hauled him in like a big tuna. The ship had nets down. They helped him scramble up the side.

“Well, well-look what the cat drug in,” Fremont Dalby said. He was soaked, of course, but he already had a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. Drop Dalby in horseshit and he’d come out with a pony. But his sardonic grin slipped as he asked, “Spot any of the other guys?”

“Maybe Gustafson.” George pointed his thumb down at the deck.

“Fuck.” The gun chief looked at the oil slick and the bobbing men and debris that were the sole remains of the Townsend. “That Asskicker sure kicked our ass, didn’t he? Hit us right where it did him the most good, the son of a bitch.”

Airplanes were still mixing it up overhead. George Enos hardly noticed. He was luxuriating-rejoicing-in being alive. “We just got ourselves some leave,” he said. ”And you know what? I wish to God we didn’t.” Dalby nodded.