The Grapple

XVII

Georgia. Chester Martin looked south and east. He was really and truly in Georgia, if only in the northwesternmost corner of the state. When he looked across it, though, he knew what he saw on the other side.

The end of the war.

Damned if I don’t, he thought. If the U.S. Army could grind across Georgia, it would cut the Confederate States in half. It would take Atlanta, or else make the city worthless to the CSA. How could the enemy go on fighting after that? Oh, both halves of a worm wiggled for a while if you sliced it in two…but not for long.

And the Confederates had to know that as well as he did. Their artillery stayed busy all the time. They staged night raids with everything from big bombers down to little puddle-jumping biplanes that flew along at treetop height and peeked right into your foxhole.

No matter what they did at night, the USA ruled the daytime skies. Two-engine and four-engine bombers pounded Confederate positions. So did U.S. fighter-bombers. After they dropped their bombs, they climbed to go after the outnumbered C.S. Hound Dogs that still rose to challenge the U.S. air armada. And fewer Hound Dogs rose each week than had the week before. Little by little, the Confederate States were getting ground down.

U.S. artillery on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge sent volleys as far into Confederate territory as they would reach, announcing that the high ground had a new owner. Some of the guns up there had belonged to the Confederacy. Unlike small arms, their artillery shared several calibers with its U.S. equivalents. They must have thought they would capture U.S. guns, not the reverse. But those streams of paratroopers floating down from the sky caught them by surprise.

Captain Rhodes came forward and cautiously looked at the fields and pine woods ahead. He didn’t use field glasses-they were a dead giveaway that an officer was up there snooping, and an invitation to a sniper to draw a bead on him. He looked from one end of a trench, walked fifty feet with his head down, then popped up for another peek.

Some of the fields out there were minefields. The Confederates had marked some of them with signs that said MINES! or warned people away with skulls and crossbones. Some of the signs were genuine. Others, by what Chester had seen before, were bluffs. And real minefields sometimes went unmarked, too. Advancing U.S. soldiers and barrels would find them the hard way-and probably come under machine-gun fire once slowed down in them.

“We can take those bastards,” Rhodes said.

Chester Martin nodded. “Yes, sir. I think we can, too. Won’t be too easy, won’t be too cheap, but we can do it.”

The company commander turned and looked west. “We ought to be cleaning out the rest of Tennessee, too, so we don’t have such a narrow front here. We can sure as hell do that. Even now, the Confederates have a devil of a time getting men and materiel from east to west.”

“Yes, sir,” Chester said again. “That’s how Nashville fell-almost an afterthought, you might say.”

“Sure.” Rhodes grinned. “Goddamn big afterthought, wasn’t it? But you’re right, Sergeant. Once we pushed past to the east, once we got over the Cumberland, Nashville stopped mattering so much. The Confederates had bigger worries closer to home. So they pulled out and let us march in, and they tried to hold Chattanooga instead.”

Chester looked back over his shoulder toward the city Captain Rhodes had named. “And they couldn’t do that, either,” he said happily.

“Nope.” Rhodes sounded pretty happy, too. “They’re like a crab-they’ve got claws that pinch, and a hard shell to go with it. But once you crack ’em, there’s nothing but meat inside.”

“Sounds good to me-except the meat in our rations is better than the horrible tinned beef they use,” Martin said. “Even they call it Dead Donkey. But their smokes are still good.” He took a pack of Dukes out of his pocket and offered it to Rhodes. “Want some?”

“Thanks. Don’t mind if I do.” The company CO took one, lit it, and started to hand the pack back.

“Keep it,” Chester said. “I’ve got plenty. Lots of dead Confederates these days, and lots of POWs who don’t need cigarettes any more.”

“Thanks,” Rhodes repeated, and stuck the pack in his shirt pocket. He took a drag, blew it out, and then shook his head. “Hate to pay you back for your kindness this way, Chester, but I don’t know what I can do about it.”

“What’s going on?” Chester grew alert. It wasn’t the same sort of alertness he used around the enemy, but your own side could screw you, too.

“Well, I hear repple-depple’s coughed up a shiny new second looey for us, so I’m afraid you’re going to lose your platoon,” Rhodes said.

“Oh.” Martin weighed that. It stung, but not too much. “I’ll live. When they made me a first sergeant after I reupped, I figured they’d have me breaking in shavetails. I’ve had some practice by now. I think I’m halfway decent at it.”

“Fine.” Rhodes set a hand on his shoulder. “You’ve got a good attitude. I’m glad you’re not getting pissy about it.”

“Life is too short.” On the battlefield, Chester had seen how literally true that was.

Second Lieutenant Boris Lavochkin turned out not to be what he expected. Oh, he was young. The only second lieutenants who weren’t young were men up from the ranks, and they didn’t need a graying first sergeant to ramrod them. Lavochkin was squat and fair and tough-looking, with the meanest, palest eyes Chester Martin had ever seen.

“You’re going to show me the ropes, are you?” the youngster asked.

“That’s the idea, sir.” Martin sounded more cautious than he’d thought he would.

“And you’ve done what to earn the right?” Lieutenant Lavochkin seemed serious.

“I lived through the Great War. I ran a company for a while. I’ve seen a good bit of action this time around, too…sir.”

Those icy eyes measured Chester like calipers. “Maybe.” Lavochkin took off his helmet to scratch his head. When he did, he showed Chester a long, straight scar above his left ear.

“You got hit, sir?” Chester said. That had to be why Lavochkin was coming out of the replacement depot.

He shrugged broad shoulders. “Only a crease. You’ve been wounded, too?”

“Once in the arm, once in the leg. You were lucky, getting away with that one.”

“If I was lucky, the shithead would have missed me.” Lavochkin peered south. “Give me the situation in front of us. I want to lead a raid, let the men see I’ll go where they go. They need to know I’m in charge now.”

A lot of shavetails wouldn’t have been, even with the rank to give orders. Lavochkin…Lavochkin was a leader, a fighter, a dangerous man. He’d go places-unless he stopped a bullet. But they all took that chance.

“Sir, maybe you’d better check with Captain Rhodes before we go raiding,” Chester said.

Lavochkin scowled. That made him look like an even rougher customer than he had before. In the end, though, he nodded. “I’ll do that,” he said.

Rhodes came up to Chester a couple of hours later, a small, bemused smile on his face. He glanced around to make sure the new lieutenant wasn’t anywhere close by before remarking, “Looks like we’ve got a tiger by the tail.”

“Yes, sir. I thought so, too,” Martin said. “You going to turn him loose?”

“I sure am,” the company commander answered. “He needs to find out what he can do, and so do we. And if things go wrong, well, you’ve got your platoon again, that’s all.”

“If I come back,” Chester said. “I’m not gonna let him take my guys out by himself. I’m going, too.”

Lieutenant Lavochkin didn’t like that. “I don’t need you to hold my hand, Sergeant.”

“I’m not doing it to hold your hand, sir,” Chester said evenly. “I’m doing it for my men.”

“In case I don’t cut it?”

“Yes, sir.” Martin didn’t beat around the bush.

Lavochkin gave him one of those singularly malignant stares. Chester just looked back. The young officer tossed his head. “Well, come on, then. We’ll see who learns something.”

The raid went in a little before midnight. Lavochkin knew enough to smear mud on his face to darken it. He carried a captured Confederate submachine gun along with the usual officer’s.45. He also had a Great War trench knife on his belt. Was he showing off, or had he been in some really nasty places before he got hurt? We’ll find out, Chester thought.

Lavochkin moved quietly. The Confederate machine-gun nest ahead sat on a small rise, but brush screened one approach most of the way up. Chester would have gone at it from that direction, too. Lavochkin slid forward as if he could see in the dark.

Suddenly, he stopped moving. “They’ve got wire, the bastards,” he said. He didn’t ask for a wire-cutter-he had one. A couple of soft twangs followed. “This way-stay low.” Chester flattened out like a toad under the wheels of a deuce-and-a-half. He got through.

Before long, he could hear the Confederates at the machine gun talking. He could smell their tobacco smoke, and see the glow of a cigarette coal. They had no idea U.S. soldiers were in the neighborhood.

“Everybody ready?” Lavochkin whispered. No one denied it. Chester was close enough to the lieutenant to see him nod. “All right, then,” he said. “At my signal, we take ’em. Remember, we want prisoners, but shoot first if you’re in trouble. Runnels, scoot over to the left like we planned.”

“Yes, sir,” the soldier said softly. He was little and skinny; Lavochkin had picked the right guy for quiet scooting. He’s a prick, but I think he knows what he’s doing, Chester thought.

Lavochkin’s signal was nothing if not dramatic. He pulled the pin from a grenade and tossed it about halfway between Runnels and the Confederate position. As soon as it burst, Runnels, who carried a captured automatic rifle, fired several quick rounds.

Naturally, the Confederates in the machine-gun nest started shooting at the noise and muzzle flashes. Chester saw the flame spurting from their weapons. He hoped Runnels was all right. He hoped he would be all right himself, too, because he was up and running for the enemy entrenchment as fast as he could go.

Runnels squeezed off another burst to keep Featherston’s men thinking about him and nobody else. He yelled like a wild man, too. The deception worked just the way Lieutenant Lavochkin hoped it would. The Confederates didn’t notice the footfalls of the onrushing U.S. soldiers till the men in green-gray were right on top of them. Martin heard a startled, “What the fuck?” as one of the machine gunners tried to swing his piece around.

Too late. Lavochkin cut him down with three accurate rounds from his submachine gun. Then he leaped down into the entrenchment. The rest of the U.S. soldiers followed. Chester hadn’t used a bayonet for anything but opening cans and holding a candle since trench raids a generation earlier. He discovered he still knew how. He stuck a machine gunner who was grabbing for a submachine gun of his own. The sharpened steel grated on a rib, then went deep. The Confederate let out a gurgling shriek as he crumpled.

Seeing one of their buddies spitted like a pig made the rest of the Confederates quit trying to fight and surrender. “Let’s get ’em out of here,” Lavochkin said. “Get the guns off the tripods and take them, too.”

“Let’s get us out of here,” Chester said. “We woke up the rest of the butternut bustards.”

Sure as hell, shouts and running feet said the Confederates were rallying. Runnels alertly fired at them. That made them hit the dirt. They didn’t know if he was there by himself or had buddies close by. The raiders scrambled out of the nest with captives and booty and hurried back toward the U.S. line. A few wild shots sped them on their way, but they made it with nothing worse than a sprained ankle and a fat lip from one of the Confederates before three men jumped on him.

Intelligence officers took the prisoners away for grilling. In the trench from which they’d started out, Lavochkin eyed Chester Martin. “Well, Sergeant?” he said. “Do I pass?”

“So far, so good, sir,” Chester answered. “The other half of the test is, not doing that kind of shit real often. You know what I mean?” Lavochkin scowled at him, but slowly nodded.

George Enos thought the Josephus Daniels was a step down from the Townsend as a ship. She was smaller and older and slower and more crowded. But she seemed a tight ship, and a happy one, too. From what he’d seen and heard, those two went together almost as often as the cliche claimed.

He’d slept in a hammock on the Townsend. Having to sling one on the Josephus Daniels was no surprise, and no great disappointment. He started to make himself at home, learning, for instance, that her sailors hardly ever called her by her last name alone. He also found out that Josephus Daniels had been Secretary of the Navy during the Great War. After all the time he’d spent on the Townsend, he still didn’t know who Townsend was. With the ship at the bottom of the Gulf of California, he wasn’t likely to find out now.

Everyone liked the skipper. Sam Carsten’s craggy face and pale, pale hair kept trying to ring a bell in George’s mind. He’d seen Carsten somewhere before, and not in the Navy. He kept picturing an oak tree…

Nobody had a good word to say about the exec. That was also normal to the point of boredom. But people did speak well of the just-departed Pat Cooley. “This Zwilling item ain’t fit to carry Cooley’s jock,” said Petty Officer Second Class Clem Thurman, who was in charge of the 40mm gun near the bow whose crew George joined.

“No?” George said. Somebody was plainly meant to.

“Fuck, no.” Thurman spat a stream of tobacco juice into the Atlantic. “Cooley was the kind of guy who’d find out what you needed and pull strings to get it for you. This new one, he looks in the book for reasons to tell you no.” He spat again.

“That’s no good,” George said.

“Tell me about it,” Thurman said. “You ask me, this mission we’re on is no damn good, either. Ireland? I got nothin’ against micks-don’t get me wrong. We give them guns so they can yank on Churchill’s nuts, that’s great. We get our ass shot off tryin’ to give ’em guns-that’s a whole different story, Charlie.”

George looked east. Nothing but ocean ahead there. Nothing but ocean all around, ocean and the rest of the ships in the flotilla. None of those ships was a carrier. They didn’t have even a baby flattop along. The cruisers carried scout aircraft, but how much good would those do when enemy bombers appeared overhead? Not enough was the answer that occurred to George.

“Yeah, well, maybe we’re better off without an escort carrier,” Thurman said when he grumbled about it. “Eighteen knots? Hell, they can’t get out of their own way-and if we get jumped, thirty airplanes probably won’t be enough to stop the limeys, especially since most of ’em won’t be fighters.”

“No wonder the skipper has us at gunnery practice all the time,” George said.

“No wonder at all,” the gun chief agreed. “’Course, the other thing is, he served a gun himself when he was a rating. He knows what’s going on.”

“He seems like a pretty good guy,” George said.

“Bet your ass,” Thurman said. “He’s on our side-and I’m not just saying that on account of the new exec is a dipshit. Carsten knows what makes sailors tick. He works us pretty hard, but that’s his job. I was in this ship when he took over, and the difference is night and day.”

George had been part of a good gun team on the Townsend. This one could beat it. They went through more live ammo than the Townsend’s skipper would have wanted to use. Sam Carsten’s attitude seemed to be that everything was fine as long as they had enough to fight with when action came.

They went on watch-and-watch a little more than halfway across the Atlantic: at the point where, if they were unlucky enough, a British patrol aircraft flying out of Limerick or Cork might spot them. The Irish rebels were supposed to be trying to sabotage those patrol flights, but who could guess how much luck they’d have?

“Now hear this.” Lieutenant Zwilling’s cold, unpleasant voice came on the PA system. “We have a wireless report that one of our submersibles just torpedoed a British destroyer about 300 miles east of here. No reports of other British warships afloat in that area. That is all.”

“Sounds good to me,” Petty Officer Thurman said. “The gatekeeper’s gone. We hope like hell he is, anyway.”

They made the closest approach at night. At midnight, they lowered a speedboat into the ocean. It replaced two lifeboats; its skeleton crew consisted of men either from Ireland or of Irish blood. They were making a one-way trip to the Emerald Isle. George passed crates of weapons and ammunition to the crane handlers, who lowered them into the speedboat. Each ship in the flotilla was doing the same thing. The irregulars battling the British occupation of their homeland would get a lift…if the munitions and men arrived.

Big, powerful gasoline engines rumbling and growling, the speedboats roared off to the east. The Josephus Daniels turned around and hightailed it back toward the USA. The black gang pulled every rev they could out of her engines. They wanted to get as far away from the Irish coast as they could by the time the sun came up.

She was slower than the Townsend. Thurman had mocked an escort carrier’s eighteen knots. George wasn’t happy with the destroyer escort’s twenty-four or twenty-five. The Townsend broke thirty easy as you please. The flotilla stuck together to help with antiaircraft protection. With really fast ships, it could have got thirty or forty miles closer to home by dawn.

And if it had, maybe the British flying boat wouldn’t have spotted it. The cruisers’ scout airplanes went after the big, ungainly machine. They even shot it down, but the damage was done. George was sure of that. Somewhere in the direction of the rising sun, armorers were loading explosives onto bombers. Maybe fighters would come along as escorts, if they could fly so far. George shuddered, remembering the carrier-launched fighter that shot up his fishing boat.

Waiting was hard, hard. Time stretched like taffy. Maybe nothing would happen. Maybe…

“This is the captain.” Sam Carsten sounded much more sure of himself on the PA than Zwilling did. “The Y-ranging officer says we’ll have visitors in a bit. Give them the kind of friendly American welcome they expect. Do your damnedest, boys. If we ride out this wave, chances are we get past the range where their low-level bombers can hit us. They may send high-altitude heavies after us, but those babies have to be lucky to hit a moving target from three miles up. That’s all.”

George looked back toward Ireland again. He felt silly as soon as he did. Of course the Y-ranging set reached farther than the Mark One eyeball. It wouldn’t be worth much if it didn’t. But those airplanes with the blue-white-red roundels were on the way.

“At least I can shoot back now,” George muttered.

“What’s that, Enos?” Petty Officer Thurman asked.

“When I was a fisherman, a limey fighter shot up my boat. I was lucky-everything missed me. But the son of a bitch killed a couple of my buddies.” George set a hand on the 40mm’s breech. “This time, by God, I’ve got a gun, too.”

Thurman nodded. “There you go. Pay those fuckers back.”

“Hope so,” George said. “Don’t much like the idea of air attack again, though, not when my last ship got bombed out from under me.” The Gulf of California had been warm and calm. The North Atlantic in the latitudes of Ireland was rarely calm and never warm. If the Josephus Daniels went down, how long could he stay afloat? Long enough to get picked up? He had to hope so.

“We’ll get ’em.” Thurman sounded confident. Like a captain, a gun chief was supposed to. Underlings could flabble. The guys in charge stayed above all that.

The Josephus Daniels built up speed. As far as George could judge, pretty soon she was going flat out. Even so, the cruisers in the flotilla could have walked away from her and the other destroyer escorts. They could have, but they didn’t. George was glad to see them stick around. They put a lot of shells in the air-and, he told himself in what was half cold-blooded pragmatism and half shameful hope, they made bigger targets than destroyer escorts did.

“Bandits within ten miles,” Lieutenant Zwilling said over the PA system. “Bearing 090. Won’t be long now.”

Everybody stared back the way they’d come. George pointed and yelled, “There!” as soon as anybody else. And if he could see the enemy airplanes, they could see his ship, too.

One of them flew in low and slow, straight for the Josephus Daniels. “Fuck me if that ain’t a torpedo bomber!” Thurman yelled. He swung the twin 40mm mount around to bear on it. “We’ve got to blast the bastard!”

“Fuck me if it’s not a two-decker!” George exclaimed as he passed shells and the gun began to roar. “Which war are we in, anyway?” Next to Japanese airplanes, it seemed downright primitive.

Tracers shot red, fiery streaks toward the biplane. “It’s what they call a Swordfish,” Thurman said. “Looks like a goddamn stringbag, don’t it? But it can do for us if we don’t knock it down first.”

They did. The Swordfish’s right wing tilted down and touched a wavetop. Then the airplane cartwheeled and broke up. It never got the chance to launch the torpedo.

“One down!” Thurman shouted exultantly. He couldn’t be sure his gun had nailed the British torpedo bomber. Several others were also shooting at it. Another Swordfish, this one trailing smoke, went into the Atlantic. But white wakes in the water said some of the slow, ugly two-deckers managed to launch their torpedoes.

The Josephus Daniels zigzagged as hard as she could. George automatically adjusted as the ship heeled first one way, then the other. He kept passing shells. The gun never ran dry. After this, if there was an after this, he would really be part of its crew-this was baptism by total immersion.

British fighters buzzed overhead like wasps. Every so often, they would swoop down and sting, machine guns blazing on their wings. George had never got a good look at the one that shot up the Sweet Sue. Now he did. The fighters seemed much more up-to-date than the torpedo bombers. He wished they didn’t.

One of them raked the Josephus Daniels from end to end, bullets clanging and whining as they ricocheted off steel and striking home with soft wet thwacks when they met flesh. Wounded men’s shrieks rang through the gunfire.

Petty Officer Thurman caught two bullets in the chest. Looking absurdly surprised, he flailed his arms a couple of times to try to keep his balance. Then, crumpling, he tumbled off the gun mount and splashed into the sea. Only a puddle of blood said he’d ever stood there.

“Jesus!” George said.

One of the aimers, a guy named Jorgenson, stepped up to take over the twin 40mm. The loader took his place. And George stepped into the loader’s slot. Jorgenson screamed at a sailor running by to jerk shells. The man started to squawk, but then settled down and started doing it.

The British fighter got away anyhow.

George had practiced as loader, both here and on the Townsend. He knew what to do, and he did it. It kept him too busy to see what was going on, which might have been a blessing in disguise. After a while, Jorgenson said, “Hold up.” George did. That gave him his first chance in several minutes to raise his head.

No more airplanes. He looked around in dull wonder. Where did they go? Back toward Ireland, he supposed. He didn’t think they’d come off a British carrier. A couple of U.S. ships had fires, but they were all still moving. With luck, they’d get out of range before the next limey strike-if there was one-could come this far. With more luck, the speedboats had landed their weapons without getting spotted. To the brass in the Navy Department, that was the only thing that mattered.

In a way, getting out of Richmond was a relief for Jake Featherston. He felt stifled in the concrete bunker under the Gray House, and in the Confederate capital as a whole. The damnyankees were clobbering the city with everything they had, and they had more than Jake ever dreamt they would. He’d done his best to flatten Philadelphia, and his best was pretty good, but the United States were doing worse in and to Richmond.

In another way, though, leaving the bunker, leaving the capital, made him sweat bullets. As long as he stayed in the bunker, he was safe. All the reinforced concrete above his head laughed off even direct hits. It had taken several, without any damage to speak of. Once he got down to Georgia, he felt secure enough. But getting there…

The trouble was, you never could tell who was reading your signals, even the ones in the codes your cryptographers swore were unbreakable. Those codes might not be such an ultra enigma to the USA. Maybe traitors had delivered cipher machines to the enemy. Maybe the Yankees were just better codebreakers than anybody in the CSA figured.

And if they were, and if their fighters bounced Jake’s transport airplane or their bombers hit his train…Well, in that case Don Partridge became President, and the Confederate States went straight down the crapper.

But it hadn’t happened, not this time. He was down here talking things over with General Patton. And the Yankees were in Georgia. Not much of Georgia, but they were over the state line. Not Kentucky. Not Virginia. Not Tennessee. Georgia. They’d never got into Georgia in the last war. He hated their being here now.

“You want my head, sir? You can have it. I won’t say boo,” Patton told him, as he had up in Richmond. “I promised I’d hold Chattanooga, and I didn’t do it. It’s my fault, no one else’s. If you need a head to roll, here’s mine.”

Not without a certain reluctance, Featherston shook his own head. “Nah. Who would I get that was better? Besides, could they have run you out unless the paratroopers dropped on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge?”

“No way in hell-uh, Mr. President,” Patton said.

“Well, I didn’t reckon so myself,” Jake said. “All right-they fooled us once, damn them. Can they do it again?”

“Not that way, anyhow,” the general answered.

“I didn’t think so, either,” Jake said. If they can, we’re in even worse shape than I figured. “So your job now is to hold ’em where they’re at, not let ’em break loose into Georgia.”

“I understand the need, sir,” Patton said. “I know how important Atlanta’s industry and rail junctions are. I’ll do everything I know how to do with the men I’ve got. I wish I had more.”

“You’ve got everything we can give you. Tell you the truth, you’ve got more than I can afford to give you,” Featherston said. “Manpower…Well, we’re moving more women into factories and onto farms. That frees up some new soldiers, anyhow. And we’ve got some new weapons we’ll be trying out here.”

“New barrels?” Patton asked eagerly. “You have no idea how galling it is to see the Yankees outgunning and outarmoring us. Barrels are supposed to be our strength, not theirs.”

“The new ones are on the drawing boards,” Jake said. “They’ll go into production as soon as we iron out the kinks. It would’ve happened sooner, but U.S. bombers pounded the crap out of the factories in Birmingham, and that set us back.” If the United States weren’t able to base bombers in Kentucky and Tennessee, they would have had a much harder time bombing a town in Alabama. Featherston couldn’t growl too loud about that, not when Patton had offered his head and he’d declined to take it.

“Well, all right, Mr. President.” By the way Patton said it, it wasn’t. It didn’t come close. Gathering himself, the general asked, “What have you got for us, then?”

“New rockets. These babies can reach way the hell up into Tennessee from here, maybe even into Kentucky,” Jake said. “They aren’t real accurate yet, but they’ll let us shoot at things we haven’t been able to touch for a while. They’re better than bombers, that’s for sure-we don’t lose a whole crew of trained men whenever one fails.”

“I hope they help.” Patton sounded less delighted than Featherston hoped he would. Most generals-most officers, come to that-were stick-in-the-muds. Jake had seen as much during the Great War. After he took over, he’d tried to get rid of as much dead wood as he could. But he couldn’t retire or shoot the whole Confederate officer corps, no matter how tempting the idea was.

He could put Patton in his place, though. “What’s this I hear about you slapping an enlisted man around?”

“Yes, sir, I did that, and I’d damn well do it again.” Patton had the courage of his convictions, anyhow. “The yellow coward wouldn’t go forward after a direct order. He blathered about combat fatigue. What nonsense!” He spat with magnificent contempt. “I would have got him moving, too-hell with me if I wouldn’t-if not for some near-mutineers. I hope the Yankees killed the lot of them when they overran Chattanooga. Some good would come from the loss in that case.”

“General, I don’t like slackers. Nobody does. But I’ve seen shellshock. Some men do break,” Jake said. “When I took the oath in 1934, I promised that soldiers would get a square deal from their officers. Christ knows I didn’t last time around. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt-once. But if I hear about anything like this again, you’ll have dug yourself one goddamn deep hole. You got that?”

“You always make yourself very plain, Mr. President.” Patton plainly didn’t like it.

Too bad, Jake thought. Had they promoted him to lieutenant for scenting the Negro uprising of 1915, he probably never would have become President of the CSA. The boiling resentment he still felt at being passed over fueled his rise to power.

A young officer came up to the President and the general. Saluting nervously, the kid said, “Sir-uh, sirs-Y-ranging reports Yankee airplanes on the way. You might want to think about getting under cover, in case they decide to unload on us up here near the front.”

“Y-ranging,” Jake muttered. That was one more place where the USA had the jump on the CSA. If not for some quiet help from Britain, the Confederacy might still be without it. But he nodded to the kid and to Patton. “Come on, General. No phony heroics today. The country needs us, and we’d better stay alive.”

“What do you mean, ‘phony heroics’?” Patton asked as the junior officer led them to a well-reinforced bombproof. “Some men even of high rank are fond of fighting at the front. In my opinion, that is as it should be.”

“Not if they throw their lives away to do it,” Jake said. “We can’t afford gestures like that, not in the spot we’re in. You don’t see me going right up to the front any more, do you? You reckon I don’t want to?”

Patton might have wanted to make a comment or two along those lines. Whatever he wanted, he didn’t do it. Featherston’s record for fighting up near the front all through the Great War spoke for itself. And, when things were going better, he’d already served the guns this time around. You could say a lot of things about him-he knew the things his enemies did say. But the only way you could call him yellow was to lie through your teeth.

Bombs started thudding home a few minutes after Jake and Patton went to the shelter. Dirt pattered down between the planks that shored up the ceiling. Kerosene lamps lit the bombproof. Their flames wavered and jerked when bombs hit close. Once, the junior officer moved one of them back from the edge of the table on which it sat. Jake didn’t get the feeling he was in any great danger, not down here.

“How long you think this’ll go on?” he asked the kid.

“Twenty minutes to a half hour, sir, if it’s the usual kind of raid.”

“They’re trying to wear us down,” Patton said.

They were doing a pretty damn good job of it, too. Jake held that thought to himself. If Patton couldn’t see it for himself, he didn’t need to hear it. “What will the Yankees be doing up top?” Featherston asked the youngster.

“Maybe some raids to grab prisoners and squeeze them.” The officer looked unhappy. “We lost a machine-gun nest like that last week. But they may just sit tight and let the airplanes pound on us.”

“How many do we usually shoot down when they come over like this?”

“A few. Not enough. The antiaircraft guns do what they can, but we really need fighters to make the enemy pay.”

“We need more fighter pilots, too,” Patton said. “Some of the kids who get into Hound Dogs these days…don’t have enough practice before they do. Let’s put it that way. If they live through their first few missions, they learn enough to do all right. But a lot of them don’t, and that costs a man and a machine.”

“I know. Ciphering out what to do about it’s not so easy, though,” Jake said. “If we slow down the training program, the pilots pick up more experience, but we don’t get ’em soon enough to do us much good. If we rush ’em, they’re still green when they come out. Like you say, General, the ones who live do learn.”

“Sometimes they get killed anyway, uh, sir,” the junior officer said. “The damnyankees just have too many airplanes.”

Featherston glared at him. He didn’t like being reminded of that. And, since the front had moved south, Confederate bombers weren’t hitting U.S. factories so hard. The ones out in California and the Pacific Northwest, which the CSA could hardly hit at all, were also making their weight felt. In a war of production, the United States had the edge-and they were using it.

After a little more than half an hour, the bombs stopped falling. “Let’s get up there and see what the hell they did to us this time,” Jake said.

They’d turned the area into one of the less pleasant suburbs of hell, that was what. Craters pocked the red earth. Smoke rose here and there from fires the bombs had set. Several motorcars lay flipped over onto one side or on their roofs. Stretcher bearers and ambulances took casualties back to aid stations. The wounded men groaned or screamed, depending on how badly hurt they were. Nobody shouted, “Freedom!”

Biting his lip, Featherston said, “It’s a bastard, isn’t it?”

“Can’t fight a war without casualties, sir,” Patton said.

“I know that,” Jake said impatiently-he couldn’t let the general think he’d found a weak spot. “But I didn’t reckon they could do so much damage so quick. What if they did push through after an air raid like that? Could we stop ’em?”

He watched Patton pick his response with care. Patton, after all, was the general whose flank attack through the mountains hadn’t driven the USA out of Tennessee and Kentucky, and the general who hadn’t held Chattanooga when it desperately needed holding. “Sir, we’d make it mighty warm for them,” Patton said at last.

That meant he didn’t know. Jake had no trouble reading between the lines. “If they break out again, we’re in a lot of trouble. A lot of trouble, you hear me?”

“We’re doing everything we can with what we’ve got,” Patton said. “That’s the Lord’s truth. If you can pull any more rabbits out of your hat, I’d love to have ’em. Maybe those rockets you talked about will do some good. I hope so. But if there’s anything bigger, I sure want to get my hands on it as quick as I can.”

Jake thought of Professor FitzBelmont and his team at Washington University. He could still win-the CSA could still win-if they got their uranium bomb built faster than the damnyankees did. If the USA beat them to that punch…Well, if that happened, a breakout in Georgia wouldn’t matter any more.

“I may have something for you, General, but I don’t know when yet,” Featherston said. “When you get it, though, it’ll be a humdinger.”

Patton looked northwest. “Sir, it had better be,” he said.

Flora Blackford smiled whenever she got a letter from Joshua. That wasn’t often enough to suit her-two a day wouldn’t have been enough to suit her-but he did write two or three times a week, when he found the chance and wasn’t too tired. Camp Pershing was in upstate New York, between Rochester and Syracuse. To Flora, that was the back of beyond. Joshua liked the weather. How he’d like it when September turned to November and then to January was liable to be another story.

He even liked the food in the mess halls, which was a truly alarming thought. By what Flora gathered from his letters, they fried everything and let him eat as much as he wanted. To an eighteen-year-old, that made a pretty good start on heaven.

He wrote about how they were whipping him into shape, and how he was stronger and faster than he’d ever been. They were turning him into the best kind of killer they knew how to manufacture. Part of Flora hated that-she didn’t want him conscripted at all. But if he had to wear the green-gray uniform, shouldn’t he be a fit, well-trained soldier? Wouldn’t that give him the best chance of coming home in one piece?

She wished she hadn’t thought of it that way. She wished she didn’t have to think of it that way. As a Congresswoman, as a President’s widow, her wishes usually came true. Not the ones that had to do with Joshua, not any more. He had wishes of his own, and the will to thwart her. He had them, and he used them, and she had to pray his enthusiastic patriotism didn’t get him killed.

The next morning, someone blew himself up while Flora was on her way in to the battered hall where Congress met in Philadelphia. The blast was only a couple of blocks away, and made the taxi’s window rattle. “Gottenyu!” she exclaimed. “Was that what I’m afraid it was?”

“I think so, ma’am.” The driver was close to sixty, and one of the hands he put on the wheel was a two-pronged hook. “Those crazy bastards don’t know when to quit.”

“You don’t even know who it was,” Flora said.

“Do I need to?” he returned. “Whoever’d strap on explosives and push the button’s gotta be nuts, right?”

“You’d hope so.” But Flora wasn’t so sure. Apparently rational, cold-blooded groups were starting to use people bombs for a very basic reason: they worked. Nothing else disrupted life the way they did. Every time you got on a bus, you looked at all the other passengers, wondering if you could spot the one about to martyr himself-or herself-for the sake of a Cause. And those other people were looking at you, wondering if you were that one.

A Mormon unhappy with the truce terms? A Confederate agent who’d got close to somebody Jake Featherston wanted dead before pushing the button? Somebody with a personal grievance and access to explosives? A genuine nut? She wouldn’t know till she heard over the wireless or read the answer in the paper.

She tipped the driver heavily when he dropped her off. “Thank you, ma’am, but you don’t have to do that,” he said.

“I didn’t do it because I had to. I did it because I wanted to,” she told him.

He touched the hook to the patent-leather brim of his cap. “Mighty kind of you,” he said, and drove off.

Kind? Flora doubted it. She’d given him extra money not least because cabs like his saved her from worrying about the other passengers on a bus. That was less egalitarian than it should have been, but she couldn’t make herself feel very guilty about it. She didn’t want to get blown up, and that was that.

She had to show her ID to get into the building. Before she could get past the entrance hall, a burly guard checked her purse and briefcase and a policewoman patted her down. By the woman’s smirk, she enjoyed it the way a man might have. Flora didn’t know what could be done about that, either. Nothing, probably.

She hurried to the room where the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War was meeting. Several Senators and Congressmen were already there. “Morning, Flora,” one of them said. “We pounded the, uh, crud out of Atlanta last night, if half of what they say on the wireless is true.”

“Good,” Flora replied. About half of what they said on the wireless usually was true.

“You all right?” the Congressman asked. “You look a little poorly.” Foster Stearns was a granite-ribbed Democrat from New Hampshire: a reactionary, a class enemy, and a good fellow. One of the things Flora had found in Congress was that the people on the other side of the aisle didn’t have horns and a tail. They were just people, no worse and no better than Socialists, and as sincere about what they believed.

“I’ve been better,” Flora said. “I heard a people bomb-I’m pretty sure that’s what it was-go off when I was coming in.”

“Oh!” everybody exclaimed. Foster Stearns pulled out a chair and made her sit down. Somebody-she didn’t see who-gave her a paper cup. She took a big swig, thinking it was water. It turned out to be straight gin, and almost went down the wrong pipe. She managed to swallow before she had to cough. She wasn’t used to straight gin right after breakfast-or any other time. But the swig seemed to help. She was less upset afterwards than she had been before.

More committee members came in. They knew about the bomb, too. “Took out quite a few folks, the miserable son of a bitch,” one of them said, and then, “Excuse me, Flora.”

“It’s all right,” Flora answered. “That’s not half what I think of him.”

“Are we all here? Shall we get started?” A Senator and a Congressman asked the same thing at the same time.

Along with everybody else, Flora looked around the conference room. Robert Taft wasn’t there. And that meant something was wrong. They should have convened five minutes earlier, at nine on the dot. He was always on time, as reliable as the sunrise. “Somebody call his apartment,” Flora said.

Somebody went outside to do that, and came back a couple of minutes later. “His wife says he left forty-five minutes ago. He was walking in-trying to lose ten pounds.” More than one committee member chuckled, remembering his rotund father.

Flora knew where Taft lived-much closer to Congressional Hall than she did. And she could make a pretty good guess about how he would have come here. When she did, she gasped in dismay. “I hope I’m wrong,” she said, “but…”

“What is it?” Congressman Stearns asked. Then he must have drawn his own mental map, for he went pale as milk. “Sweet Jesus Christ, you don’t think the people bomber got him?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, “but he would have been in about the right place at about the wrong time. And the Mormons and the Confederates both hate him like rat poison. The Canadians, too, come to that.”

“We’d better find out.” Foster Stearns and three other committee members said that or something very much like it. Stearns added, “We don’t even have to adjourn, because we never convened. Come on!” They all hurried toward the entrance.

“Has Senator Taft come in?” Flora asked the butch policewoman.

“Not by this way,” she answered, and he would have.

Flora and the rest of the committee members looked at one another, their consternation growing. Somebody said, “Maybe we’d better start calling hospitals. Philadelphia Methodist is closest to where the bomb went off, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Foster Stearns said while Flora was still forming the picture in her mind. He nodded to the policewoman. “Where’s the nearest telephone we can use?”

“Down that hallway, sir, on the left-hand side.” She pointed. She was more polite to him than she had been to Flora. With a wave of thanks, Stearns trotted off.

Along with the other committee members, Flora followed him. Maybe there would be more than one telephone, so they could call several hospitals at once. And even if there weren’t, they would hear the news as soon as he got it.

He was already talking when Flora came up. “You do have casualties there?” he asked. “How many? Have any gone to other hospitals, too?” To the other Representatives and Senators, he said, “At least a couple of dozen. It’s a bad one.” He spoke into the handset again: “Is Senator Taft there?…He is? How is he? This is Congressman Stearns. I’m on a committee with him.” He waited. Someone spoke into his ear. Flora knew the answer right away-he looked as if the person on the other end of the line had punched him in the stomach. “Thank you, Miss.” He hung up the telephone like a man moving in the grip of a bad dream.

“He’s gone, isn’t he?” Flora said.

“He is.” Stearns nodded dazedly. “Massive internal injuries, she said. They did everything they could, but…” He spread his hands.

“Do they know who the bomber was?” Two or three people asked the same question.

Now Stearns shook his head. “Only pieces left. The woman at the hospital said it was a man. Maybe what he’s got in his pockets will tell them more-or maybe it won’t.”

Something flashed through Flora’s mind. A story she’d read to Joshua, back when he cared about stories and not Springfields. “Pocketses,” she muttered, but the memory wouldn’t take any more shape than that. “Whoever did it, he hurt us when he did. Robert was a good friend to his friends, and a bad enemy to his enemies.”

“He was a stiff-necked old grouch,” she heard one of her fellow Socialists whisper to another.

That was also true; no one who’d ever had much to do with Robert Taft would or could deny it. Taft had no patience for people who didn’t measure up to his own stern notions of rectitude. Despite wide political differences, he and Flora had got on well for years. Beyond any doubt, that said something about her. They made odd friends, the austere Ohio aristocrat and the New York garment worker’s daughter, odd but good.

And now they didn’t. I’ll have to go to the funeral, she thought. She had a black dress that was getting too much wear these days. Part of that was the war’s fault, part her own for reaching her fifties. No matter how often you told them not to, people kept dying on you.

“I think,” Congressman Stearns said, “we’d better go back and let some unhappy Army officers know we’re adjourning.”

Going on the way Taft wanted would have meant convening the committee and raking those bungling officers over the coals. Flora was sure of that. She was just as sure she had no more heart for it than her colleagues did.

Two of the officers-a brigadier general and a colonel-were in the conference room when the committee members returned. “Good God!” the colonel exclaimed when he heard the news. “He was a son of a bitch-everybody knew that-but he was our son of a bitch, and everybody knew that, too.”

His words more pungently echoed Flora’s. She kept feeling at the hole losing Robert Taft left in her spirit. It seemed as real, and as painful, as the hole from a lost tooth in her mouth. The dentist gave her codeine after doing his worst to her. There was no codeine for a hole in the spirit. It would have to hurt till time turned it from an open, bleeding wound to a scar.

Before she even knew she was doing it, she started to cry. So much already lost in this war. And she thought about Joshua’s latest letter. She’d lost so much-and she still had so much to lose.

Jefferson Pinkard thought Humble, Texas, was mighty well named. It lay twenty miles north of Houston, and was about the size of Snyder-three or four thousand people. For a while after the turn of the century, Humble might have been Proud: they struck oil there, and a lot of people got rich. Then the mad inflation after the Great War wiped out everybody’s money, rich and poor alike, and after that the wells started running dry. Some of them still pumped, but they weren’t making anybody rich these days. Lumber from the pine woods around the town helped business keep going.

Humble would just about do, Jeff decided. He’d looked at a lot of small towns in southeastern Texas, and this one seemed best suited to his purposes. A railroad ran through it; building a spur off the main line would be easy. Local sheriffs and Mexican soldiers had already cleaned most of the Negroes out of the area. If he had to build a new camp here, he could do that.

He’d rather have stayed in Snyder, but that wouldn’t fly much longer. Who would have thought the United States cared enough about Negroes to try to keep the Confederates from getting rid of them? What business of the damnyankees was it? If they wanted to let their blacks live, they could do that. But they didn’t like them well enough to let more from the CSA come over their border.

Jeff could see advantages to starting over. He could do things the right way from the beginning. The bathhouses that weren’t would go up as an organic part of the camp, not as add-ons. He could build a proper crematorium here, get rid of the bodies once and for all, instead of dumping them into trenches. Yes, it could work.

It would disrupt routine, though. To a camp commandant, routine was a precious thing. Routine meant the camp was operating the way it was supposed to. When routine broke down, that was when you had trouble.

Of course, if you looked at it another way, routine at Camp Determination had already broken down. Damnyankee bombing raids and the U.S. Eleventh Army’s drive toward Snyder had ruined it. How could you run a proper camp when you weren’t sure how much population you needed to reduce from one day to the next? How could you when you didn’t know whether soldiers in green-gray would start shelling you soon? That hadn’t happened yet, but Jeff knew it could.

When he talked to the mayor of Humble about running up a camp outside of town, that worthy said, “You’ll use local lumber, won’t you? You’ll use local labor?”

“Well, sure,” Jeff answered. “As much as I can, anyways.”

“Sounds good, General,” the mayor said, eyeing the wreathed stars on either side of the collar on Jeff’s uniform. Pinkard didn’t explain about Freedom Party ranks-life was too short. The mayor went on, “Once you get this place built, reckon you’ll want to keep some local boys on as guards? And some of the older fellas who maybe got hurt the last time around or maybe aren’t up to marching twenty-five miles a day?” The mayor himself, with a big belly, a bald head, and a bushy white mustache, fell into that last group.

“I’ll do what I can,” Jeff said. “If they’ve got what it takes, I’ll use ’em.”

The mayor beamed. He thought Pinkard had made a promise. Jeff beamed, too. He knew damn well he hadn’t. The mayor stuck out his pudgy hand. “Sounds like we got ourselves a deal,” he said.

“I hope so,” Jeff said, shaking on it. “Still have to clear things with Richmond, too, you understand.” If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand anything.

But the mayor did. “Well, sure, General. That’s how things work nowadays, isn’t it?” he said. “You want to use my telephone?” He seemed proud to have one on his desk.

“I sure as hell do,” Pinkard answered. He slid the telephone over to his side of the desk, but didn’t pick up the handset or dial the long-distance operator till the mayor ate humble pie and scurried out of his own office. Then Jeff listened to the inevitable clicks and pops on the line as his call went through. And then he listened to the voice of Ferdinand Koenig’s secretary, which was sultry enough to fit into any man’s wet dream.

“Oh, yes, sir,” she purred. “I’m sure he’ll speak to you. Hold on, please.”

“I thank you kindly.” It wasn’t even that Jeff was a week and several hundred miles away from his wife. Edith could have been standing beside him and he would have been extra polite to a woman with a voice like that.

“Koenig here.” The Attorney General of the CSA, by contrast, sounded like a raspy old bullfrog. But he had Jake Featherston’s ear, so he didn’t need to be sexy. “You find what you were looking for, Pinkard?”

“Reckon I did, sir. I’m in a little town called Humble, up north of Houston. Got a railroad line, and a spur to a new camp’d be easy to build. Mayor’s damn near wetting his pants, he wants it in his back yard so bad.”

“Humble, you say? Hang on. Let me look at a map.” There was a pause while Koenig rustled papers; Jeff listened to him do it. He came back on the line. “All right-I found it. Yeah, that looks pretty good. Yankee bombers’d have a devil of a time getting there from anywhere, wouldn’t they?”

“If they wouldn’t, sir, we are really and truly fucked,” Pinkard replied.

A cold silence followed. Then the Attorney General said, “You want to watch your mouth. I’ve said that before, haven’t I?”

“Yeah, I reckon you have.” Jeff wasn’t eager to kowtow to a voice on the line from Richmond, no matter how important that voice’s owner was. “But wasn’t I telling you the truth?” He used Jake Featherston’s catchphrase with sour relish. “Things don’t look so good right now, do they?”

“Maybe not, but we’ll lick the damnyankees yet. You just see if we don’t.” Ferd Koenig sounded absolutely confident.

“Hope like hell you’re right, sir.” Jeff meant that. “Can we talk about this Humble place some more?” The biggest advantage he saw to closing down Camp Determination was purely personal: it would let him get his family the hell out of Snyder without looking as if they were running away. They’d come through every Yankee bombing raid so far, but how long could they stay lucky? Long enough, he hoped.

He wondered if Koenig felt like raking him over the coals some more, but the Attorney General backed off. “Yeah, let’s do that,” he said. “Reckon it’ll suit.”

“All right, then. Next question is, how do we get it built? I used niggers to run up Camp Determination, but I don’t figure that’d work this time around. Can I get me a team of Army engineers, or are they all busy over in Tennessee and Georgia?” That Jeff could mention the Army’s being busy in Georgia said how badly things were going.

Ferd Koenig didn’t hesitate. “You’ll have ’em,” he promised. “Population reduction is a priority, by God. We’ll take care of this, and in jig time, too. You get ready to finish what you’ve got going on at Camp Determination, and we’ll run up the camp by Humble. Plans’ll be about the same as the ones you used before, right?”

“Yes, sir, except we’ll want the bathhouses built in instead of tacked on, if you know what I mean,” Pinkard said. “And I’d like a crematorium alongside, too. More ground in use around here-not so much room for dozers to scrape out the big old trenches we’d need.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Ferd Koenig said. “We’ve got ’em in place at a couple of other camps. Design’s already taken care of, so all we’ve got to do is run up another one.”

“That sounds good. I thought so, but I wasn’t sure,” Jeff said.

“Let me write it down so I make sure I have it straight.” Koenig did, then read it back. “That about cover things?”

Jeff thought before he answered. If he’d forgotten something, getting it fixed after the engineers left wouldn’t be so easy. But he couldn’t think of anything-and then he did. “Mayor here wants to make sure you hire locals for some of the work.”

“Oh, sure-we always take care of shit like that. Gotta keep those boys happy, too,” the Attorney General said indulgently. “You get ready to move, ’cause this one’ll go up faster’n hell. We don’t want to pull the engineers off the line any longer than we have to.”

“I’ll handle that, sir,” Jeff said. “You can count on it.”

“If I couldn’t, somebody else’d be there. Freedom!” Koenig hung up.

The mayor was plainly worrying about his telephone bill when Jeff called him back in. Jeff wondered if the man had ever called anywhere as far away as Virginia. He would have bet against it. But the mayor’s face lit up when Jeff said, “Well, Ferd Koenig reckons Humble will suit us as well as I do. Some Army engineers’ll come in to run up the camp, and then, by God, then we’ll get down to business.”

“That’s mighty fine news-mighty fine,” the mayor said. “Uh-you do recall I’d like some of our people from around these parts to help do the work?”

“Ferd says the engineers’ll take care of that,” Pinkard told him. His repeated use of the Attorney General’s nickname seemed to impress the mayor even more than the near-promise.

“Good news. Damn good news.” The mayor reached into his desk and pulled out a bottle and a couple of glasses. “We ought to have us a drink to celebrate.”

“I sure don’t mind,” Jeff said. The mayor’s whiskey turned out to be rotgut, but Jeff didn’t flabble. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t drunk rotgut before. One drink led to several, and to his staying over in Humble a night longer than he’d intended. The mayor offered to get him a girl for the evening, but he turned that down. He was more practical than virtuous. Any woman the mayor got him would be a pro, and with a pro you never could tell what you were bringing home to your wife. That wouldn’t be so good, especially not with a baby on the way pretty soon.

He set out across Texas for Snyder the next morning. As usual, the sheer size of the state flabbergasted him. The drive in the old Birmingham felt more like crossing a country. Even real cities like Dallas and Fort Worth seemed dwarfed by the immensity all around them. Bomb damage seemed diminished and spread out, too. He knew the USA had hit both towns hard the year before, but he saw only a few battered, firescarred buildings.

West of Fort Worth, woods grew scarcer and the prairie stretched as far as the eye could see. Every so often, Jefferson Pinkard began to spot shot-up motorcars by the side of the road. Some were merely pocked with bullet holes. A couple had bloodstains marring the paint of one door or another; a hasty grave was dug beside one of those. And some were charred wrecks: autos where a bullet had gone through the engine or the gasoline vapors in a mostly empty fuel tank.

Pinkard kept a wary eye on the sky. The Birmingham had nowhere to run to and nowhere to hide if U.S. fighters or fighter-bombers swooped down. Maybe he could get out and hide in a ditch while they shot up the auto. That was his best hope, anyhow.

When he stopped for gas in a little town called Cisco, the woman who pumped it said, “Reckon you’re either mighty brave or mighty damn dumb, comin’ so far in broad daylight.”

“I can go faster,” Jeff said.

“Yeah, but you can end up dead faster, too,” she replied. “Your funeral-if you get one.”

Jeff remembered the grave next to the motorcar. He remembered the bloodstains he’d seen, too. And he stayed in Cisco for a roast-beef sandwich and a couple of bottles of beer, and waited till twilight deepened to get going again. Maybe he wasted a few hours. Maybe he saved his own life. He never knew one way or the other.

Crawling along with headlights masked down to slits, he didn’t get into Snyder till not long before dawn. He drove with special care in town, because craters scarred so many streets. You could crash down into one before you saw it. But he made it home, and found he still had a home to come back to. “Sorry to bother you, hon,” he told Edith. “We’ll be able to clear out, go somewhere safer, before real long.”

“Thank you, Jesus!” she said, and squeezed him tight despite her swollen belly.

Cassius was proud of his new boots. They fit him perfectly, and the Mexican soldier who’d worn them before didn’t need them any more. Somebody-Napoleon?-said an army marched on its stomach. Food mattered, all right, but so did your feet. The shoes in which Cassius got out of Augusta were falling apart, so he was glad to get such fine replacements.

“Lucky bastard,” Gracchus said. His feet were very large and very wide. Cassius’ were of ordinary size, like the rest of him. He’d never thought of that as luck before, but maybe it was.

“We’ll get you some, boss,” he said-as much of a title as the guerrilla leader would take.

“Have to slit ’em,” Gracchus said morosely. The shoes he wore now were slit on either side, to make room for his uncooperative feet. What that lacked in style, it more than made up for in comfort. Gracchus eyed Cassius thoughtfully. “You know how to drive?”

“Wish I did.” Cassius shook his head. “Folks never had an auto or nothin’, though. How come?”

“Want to steal me a pickup truck from somewheres, mount a machine gun in the back,” Gracchus said. “Some of the other bands been doin’ it, I hear tell. Raise all kinds of hell that way. Ain’t as good as havin’ our own barrel, but it’s about as good as a bunch o’ niggers can hope for.”

About as good as a bunch o’ niggers can hope for: eleven words that spoke volumes about how things were in the Confederate States of America. Crouched in pine woods, hoping the whites and Mexicans wouldn’t put airplanes overhead to hunt for the band and hoping the trees would screen the fires and guerrillas if they did, Cassius had his own worm’s-eye view of what those words meant.

He also had his own reasons for wanting to hit back at the Freedom Party and everyone who stood with it: everyone in the CSA who wasn’t black, or as close as made no difference. “Don’t know how to drive,” he said, “but you bet I do me some fancy shootin’ if you put me in the back o’ that truck.”

Gracchus chuckled. “Every nigger in the band I talk about this with say the same thing. A couple o’ the gals, they say they give me what you ain’t even got if only I put ’em back dere.”

Cassius hadn’t dared approach the handful of women who marched and fought along with Gracchus’ men. They were tougher than he was, and he knew it. The word intimidated probably would have sprung to his father’s mind. It didn’t occur to Cassius; he just knew that those gals scared hell out of him.

“Where you gonna get a pickup?” If he thought about the truck, he didn’t have to think about the women.

“Off a farm, I reckon,” Gracchus answered. “Damn ofays mostly keepin’ ’em locked up tight nowadays, though. They know what we kin do if we git our hands on one.”

Locks didn’t usually stop Gracchus when he set his mind on whatever lay behind them. His scouts didn’t need long to find a farm with a pickup truck that would do. The farm had a telephone line so the whites there could call for help if guerrillas attacked them. Gracchus only smiled when he noted that. Among the tools his irregulars carried were several wire cutters.

“Dey kin call all dey please,” he said. “It don’t go through, ain’t that a shame?”

The guerrillas grinned, white teeth shining from dark faces. Despite those grins, they spent a couple of days sizing up the farm before they made their move. If the whites brought in riflemen or a machine gun of their own under cover of night, they could give raiders a wicked surprise. Gracchus couldn’t afford to get surprised that way.

After the telephone line was cut, he pitched a rock through a farmhouse window to get the attention of the people inside. When curses said somebody was awake in there, he shouted, “Throw out the keys to your truck an’ we goes away. We don’t hurt nobody. We jus’ takes the truck an’ goes.”

“Over my dead body!” the man inside yelled. In a lower voice, he went on, “Sal, call the militia!”

“Can’t get the operator!” Sal said in despairing tones.

“Las’ chance, ofay!” Gracchus shouted. “We kin hot-wire the truck if we gotta, but we gonna have to shoot you to make sure you don’t start shootin’ your ownself when we takes it away.”

A rifle shot split the night. The bullet didn’t miss Gracchus by much, but it missed. The guerrillas knew what to do. Some of them started banging away to make the people inside keep their heads down. Others, Cassius among them, ran toward the farmhouse. He wished he had a helmet to go with his boots. But a helmet wouldn’t stop a rifle round, either.

The defenders had several firearms. If they raised enough of a ruckus, someone at a nearby farm might telephone the authorities or go out to get help. The guerrillas had to win quickly, take the truck, with luck kill the whites, and disappear before superior force arrived.

“I’ll shift them fuckers,” a Negro called. “Break me a window an’ see if I don’t.”

Cassius was close enough to a window to smash it with the butt of his Tredegar. Had one of the farm family waited on the other side of the glass, he would have caught a bullet or a shotgun blast with his teeth. That crossed his mind only later. He did know enough to get away fast once the stock hit the window.

A few seconds later, a Featherston Fizz sailed in through the opening he’d made. He heard it shatter on the floor inside. That would spread blazing gasoline in a nice, big puddle. “Burn, you goddamn ofays!” he yelled. “Burn in your house, an’ burn in hell!”

Flames lit that room from the inside. They showed a white man standing in the doorway to see if he could do anything about the fire. Cassius snapped a shot at him. He wasn’t the only guerrilla who fired at the white man, either. The fellow went down, either hit or smart enough not to offer a target like that again.

Another Featherston Fizz flew into the farmhouse. Cassius liked the idea of roasting whites with a weapon named for the founder of the Freedom Party. He’d run into a phrase in a book one time-hoist with your own petard. He didn’t know what a petard was (though his father likely would have), but he got the sense of it anyhow. Those Fizzes were petarding the devil out of the family in there.

They stayed in the burning building as long as they could. They stayed a lot longer than Cassius would have wanted to. Then they all charged out the back door at once, shooting as they came. Had they made it to the woods, they might have escaped. But they didn’t. In the light of the fire behind them, they made easy targets. An old man in a nightshirt killed a woman with him before he went down. Another woman, hardly more than a girl, blew off her own head with a shotgun.

They had to fear what the Negroes would have done with them-to them-had they taken them alive. And they had reason to fear that. Revenge came in all kinds of flavors. If you could get some with your dungarees around your ankles…well, why not? It was nothing whites hadn’t done to blacks through the centuries of slavery. Cassius’ own mother couldn’t have been above half Negro by blood. He himself was lighter than a lot of guerrillas in Gracchus’ band. He wasn’t light enough to pass for white, though-not even close. In the CSA, that was as black as you had to be to get reckoned a Negro, as black as you had to be these days to get shipped off to a camp and have your population reduced.

“Let’s get outa here!” Gracchus shouted. “The ofays, they see the fire fo’ sure.”

“We oughta stay, shoot the bastards when they come,” somebody said.

“You dumb fuckin’ nigger, you reckon dey think a fire in the middle o’ the night go an’ happen all by itself?” Gracchus said scornfully. “They don’ jus’ bring the fire engines. They bring the armored cars an’ the machine guns, too-bet your ass they do. I say get movin’, I mean get movin’!”

No one argued any more. Cassius did ask, “We got us the pickup?”

“Oh, hell, yes,” Gracchus answered. “Leonidas done drove it off five minutes ago.”

“All right by me,” Cassius said. “I was busy five minutes ago.”

“Lots of us was,” the guerrilla leader allowed. “Ain’t busy now, though, so git.”

Cassius got. Part of him regretted missing the chance to ambush the whites who’d come to the farm family’s rescue. But he knew Gracchus was right: who would ambush whom wasn’t obvious. Best not to tempt fate.

Somewhere up in the northwestern part of Georgia, the Stars and Stripes already flew in place of the Stars and Bars. Sooner or later, the Yankees would break out into the rest of the state. Cassius could see that coming. All the black guerrillas could. If they could stay alive and keep harrying the Confederates till the U.S. Army arrived…

If we can do that, we win the war, Cassius thought.

Then he wondered whether winning the war would be worth it. What did he have to go back to in Augusta? Nothing. His family was gone, his apartment not worth living in. The rest of the guerrillas were no better off. They’d already lost, no matter how the war went.

“Boss?” he said as the guerrillas loped away.

“What you want?” Gracchus asked.

“Suppose the United States lick Jake motherfuckin’ Featherston. Suppose we’re still breathin’ when that happens. What the hell we do then?”

“Don’t know about you, but I got me a big old bunch of ofays I wants to pay back,” the guerrilla leader answered. “Reckon that’ll keep me busy a while.”

Cassius nodded. “Sure enough, we can do that for a while. But what kind of life we gonna have? What kind of country this gonna be? Can’t kill all the damn whites-wouldn’t be nobody left then. Gotta live with ’em some kinda way. But how? How we go on, knowin’ what they done to us?”

“Fuck, I dunno. I ain’t never worried about it. Ain’t had time to worry about it-been too worried about stayin’ alive,” Gracchus said. “Lookin’ down the road…You don’t want to think too goddamn much, you hear what I’m sayin’? Spend all your time thinkin’ ’bout tomorrow, you ain’t gonna live to git there.”

That made some sense. But Cassius said, “We ain’t old or nothin’. We make it through this goddamn war, we got a lot o’ time ahead of us. Maybe we go on up to the USA. They ain’t so hard on niggers there.”

“That’s a fact-they ain’t,” Gracchus said. “But here’s another fact-they don’t like niggers much, neither. If they did, they woulda let more of us git away when the Freedom Party first took over. But they didn’t. They closed their border so we had to stay in the CSA an’ take whatever Featherston’s fuckers done dished out. Yankees like us better’n they like Confederate sojers, but it don’t go no further’n that.”

He didn’t just make some sense there-he made much too much. “What’re we supposed to do, then?” Cassius wanted to wail the question. Instead, it came out as more of a panting grunt. It was the sort of thing he would have asked his father when he and Scipio weren’t quarreling.

His father would have had a good, thoughtful answer for it. Gracchus just shrugged and said, “We gots to stay alive. We gots to hit the ofays till the war’s done, an’ go on hittin’ ’em afterwards. Past that…Hell, I don’t know nothin’ past that. Find out when I gits there, if I gits that far.”

The way things were, maybe that was a good, thoughtful answer. If you were someplace where you couldn’t make plans, didn’t trying only waste your time? For now, what was there besides fighting and taking whatever vengeance you could? Cassius trotted on. He couldn’t see anything besides that now himself.