The Grapple

IV

Up until a few years earlier, sharecroppers lived in this sorry little collection of shacks. Now the buildings stood sad and vacant under Georgia’s mild spring sun. “Where did everybody go?” Jonathan Moss asked. “Did the Freedom Party catch the people who were here and send them to a camp?”

To his surprise, Spartacus shook his head. “Don’t reckon so,” the black guerrilla leader answered. “Reckon they went to town, to look for work there. Weren’t no’ mo’ work here, that’s fo’ damn sure.”

“Why the hell not?” Nick Cantarella asked. “You got nothin’ but miles and miles of cotton farms and tobacco farms and shit like that.”

Spartacus surprised Moss again, this time by chuckling in grim amusement. “You is a city fella,” Spartacus said, not unkindly. “You is a city fella, an’ you don’t see how the country work. Used to be plenty jobs fo’ nigger field hands, yeah. Then the Freedom Party make all these tractors an’ harvesters an’ shit, throw Lawd only know how many niggers outa work. Goddamn bastards.”

“That’s not all it did,” Cantarella said. “Factories they built to turn out those tractors and harvesters, they’re making barrels and armored cars nowadays. You can bet your ass on that.”

“Sly,” Moss said. “Sly twice, because it let them drive the Negroes off the fields and let them gear up for turning out war machines without making the USA flabble about it.”

“Fuck me,” Spartacus said, looking from one of them to the other. “I seen the first part o’ dat, on account of it happen to me an’ mine. But the other half…Didn’t worry ’bout dat none.”

“Yeah, well, those Freedom Party fuckers wouldn’t be half so dangerous if the guys running the show for ’em were dumb,” Cantarella said. “Featherston’s a maniac, but he’s a goddamn smart maniac, you know what I mean?”

Jonathan Moss did, and wished he didn’t. Fighting the war against the Confederates hadn’t proved anything to him one way or the other. Soldiers were soldiers, and sometimes where they came from hardly mattered. Military life had rhythms of its own. But his time since escaping from Andersonville told a different story.

He’d wondered how the Confederates could hold down the countryside with so many whites of military age off fighting the USA. Now he knew. If Negroes in the countryside lost their jobs, a lot of them had to go to the CSA’s cities and towns, where they were easier to keep track of and get hold of. No, the people at the top of the Freedom Party weren’t dumb at all. Too damn bad.

Meanwhile, some of the blacks still in the countryside did their best to make the Confederates unhappy. Spartacus said, “Reckon we kin spend the night heah. Ain’t nobody round seen us go in. Better’n sleepin’ on bare ground.”

Moss didn’t argue with that. His middle-aged bones thought anything was better than sleeping on bare ground. War was a young man’s game. As a fighter pilot, he’d made up in experience what he lacked in exuberance. Even so, he’d needed more rest and more regular rest than his young comrades, and he wasn’t able to fly as many missions.

Here, on the ground in Georgia, his years shoved themselves in his face in all kinds of ways. He got tired. He got hungry. When the shooting started, he got scared. Spartacus’ black guerrillas were mostly young and entirely fearless. When they attacked whites, they did it with a fierce joy, almost an exaltation, that left him admiring and astonished. He didn’t think he’d ever felt that ferocious in an airplane over Canada in the last war.

Of course, he hadn’t had such good reasons for ferocity, either.

He went into one of the cabins. It smelled all musty; it had been deserted for some time, and water and mold had their way inside. But even brand-new, it would have indicted the system that produced it. No running water. No plumbing. No electricity. No gas. Not even a wood-burning stove-all the cooking was done over a fireplace.

“I’ve seen horses with better stalls than this,” he said.

“Yeah.” Nick Cantarella nodded. “Tell you something else, too-horses deserve better than this. So do people.”

Not much was left inside the cabin to show how the people who used it had lived. A cheap pine stool lay tumbled in a corner. A few dishes, just as cheap, some of them broken, sat on a counter. When Moss put the stool back on its legs, he found a rag doll, face leprous with mildew, forgotten behind it. Did some little colored girl cry and cry because that doll was lost? He’d never know now, any more than he’d know whether that little girl was still alive.

“Can’t even light a fire,” Cantarella grumbled. “Anybody white sees smoke coming out of the chimney, he’ll sic the Mexicans on us.”

“Yeah, well, it could be worse,” Moss said. “They could have guys after us who really want to fight.”

Nick Cantarella laughed, though he wasn’t kidding. Francisco Jose’s soldiers rapidly discovered the black guerrillas were desperately in earnest. Spartacus’ men didn’t need long to figure out that the soldiers from the Empire of Mexico weren’t, at least if not under direct attack. The Mexicans didn’t want to be in Georgia. They resented C.S. whites almost as much for making them come up here as they resented C.S. blacks for having the gall to shoot back. It wasn’t quite a plague on both your houses, but it came close.

“What do we have for food?” Cantarella asked.

“I’ve got some ham and cornbread. How about you?”

“Cornbread, too, and I’ve still got a couple of ration cans from that dead Mexican we found.” Cantarella grimaced. “Damned if I know how the Confederates go on eating that slop. I mean, the stuff we have is lousy, but this is a hell of a lot worse.”

“It’s pretty bad,” Moss agreed. Pilots ate better than soldiers in the field-most of the time, anyway. He went on, “It’s better than what we got in Andersonville, though, except when the Red Cross packages came through.” Rations for POWs were supposed to be the same as what the captor’s soldiers got. Theory was wonderful-either that or the Confederate States were in more trouble than anybody north of the Mason-Dixon Line suspected.

They shared what they had. It filled their bellies, although a chef at the Waldorf-Astoria-or even a mess sergeant-would have turned up his nose, or more likely his toes. Despite lacking a fire, Moss appreciated being able to sleep with a wall, no matter how drafty, between him and the outside world. What Georgia called winter had been mild by the standards of Ontario or Chicago, but it still got chilly. Spring days were warmer. Spring nights didn’t seem to be.

Then again, Moss suspected he could sleep through an artillery duel in the middle of a blizzard. Any chance for sleep he got, he grabbed with both hands. He knew his age was showing, knew and didn’t care.

Captain Cantarella shook him awake much too early the next morning. Any time before the next afternoon would have been too early, but the sun was barely over the horizon. Moss’ yawn almost made the top of his head fall off. “Already?” he croaked.

“’Fraid so,” Cantarella answered. “They’ve got coffee going out there, if that makes you feel any better.”

“Not much,” Moss said, but he sat up. “What they call coffee’ll be nothing but that goddamn chicory, anyhow.”

“Maybe a little bit of the real bean,” Cantarella said. “And chicory’ll open your eyes, too.”

“Yeah, but it tastes like you’re drinking burnt roots,” Moss said.

“That’s ’cause you are,” Cantarella said cheerfully. “If you don’t get your ass in gear, though, you won’t get to drink any burnt roots, on account of everybody else will have drunk ’em all up.” There was a threat to conjure with. Moss got to his feet. He creaked and crunched, but he made himself move.

After a tin cup full of essence of burnt roots-and maybe a little bit of the real bean-life looked better, or at least less blurry. Moss munched on a chunk of cornbread. Spartacus squatted beside him. “Nigger come out from Americus in the night,” the guerrilla leader remarked. “He say there’s a train comin’ we gots to blow. Gots to sabotage.” He spoke the last word with sardonic relish.

And Jonathan Moss liked the idea of striking a train better than he liked going into these half-assed Georgia towns and shooting them up. Shooting up a town annoyed the Confederates and made them flabble. Wrecking a train, though, meant the men and munitions aboard either wouldn’t get into the fight against the USA or would get there late. “Sounds good,” he said. “What’s on this one? Do you know?”

“Oh, I know, all right.” Spartacus sounded thoroughly grim. “Niggers is on it.”

“Huh?” Even after the mostly ersatz coffee, Moss wasn’t at his best.

“Niggers,” Spartacus repeated. “From No’th Carolina, I reckon. They’s headin’ for them camps. They git there, they don’t come out no mo’. So we gots to make sure they ain’t gonna git there.”

Rescuing a trainload of blacks wouldn’t do the USA much good, but Moss didn’t even dream of trying to talk the guerrilla chieftain out of it. Spartacus had his own worries, his own agenda. When those took him on a track that also helped the United States, he didn’t mind. When they didn’t, he didn’t care.

One of his men knew more about dynamiting train tracks than Nick Cantarella did, and Cantarella was no blushing innocent. The U.S. officer did suggest a diversionary raid a few miles away to give the explosives man-his name, also likely a nom de guerre, was Samson-a chance to work undisturbed. Spartacus liked that. “Sneaky fucker, you,” he said, nothing but admiration in his voice.

He sent off a few of his men to shoot at trucks on the highway. That would be plenty to draw the Confederates’ attention-and that of their Mexican stooges, too. The rest of the band lurked close by where Samson did his job.

The train pushed a heavily laden flat car ahead of the locomotive. That kept Samson’s bomb from wrecking the engine itself. Against some kinds of sabotage, it might have mattered. But the bomb still made the train stop. Then the guerrillas sprayed the engine and the men inside with gunfire. Steam plumed from the punctured boiler.

Some of Spartacus’ men ran forward to open the passenger cars and freight cars in the train. Others stayed back to cover them. Jonathan Moss was one of those who hung back-he doubted the Negroes in there would welcome any white face just then.

Blacks began spilling out, more and more and more of them. “Sweet Jesus!” Cantarella said. “How many smokes did those Freedom Party bastards cram in there?”

“Too many,” Moss said, and then, “Now I believe every atrocity story I ever heard. You don’t pack people in like that if you don’t mean to dispose of them.”

He watched in horrified fascination as the Negroes scattered over the countryside. They didn’t know where they were going, where they would sleep, or what-if anything-they would eat. But they were sure of one thing, and so was he: whatever happened to them here, they would be better off than if this train got to where it was going.

Most of the time, Irving Morrell didn’t like getting called back to Philadelphia for consultation. Some things, though, were too big to plan on the back on an envelope. What to do once the USA drove the CSA out of Ohio seemed to fall into that category.

Brigadier General John Abell met him at the Broad Street Station. The tall, thin, pale General Staff officer was as much a product of the War Department as Morrell was of the field. Morrell was sure Abell distrusted him as much as he distrusted the other man, and for reasons probably mirroring his own.

“Good to see you under these circumstances,” Abell said, shaking his hand.

“Good to be here under these circumstances,” Morrell answered. Better by far to come to Philadelphia to plan the next attack than to figure out how to defend the city. More than eighty years had passed since a Confederate army reached Philadelphia. Morrell devoutly hoped the city never saw another one.

As they walked from the station to the auto Abell had waiting, the General Staff officer said, “When we beat the Confederates this time, we’re going to beat them so flat, they’ll never give us trouble again. We’ll beat them so flat, they won’t even think about raising a hand against us from now on.”

“I like that,” Morrell said. The enlisted man driving the government-issue Chevrolet sprang out to open the back door for his exalted passengers. After Morrell slid into the green-gray auto, he went on, “Can we bring it off?”

“Militarily? I think we can. It won’t be easy or cheap, but we can do it.” Abell sounded coldly confident. “We can, and we need to, and so we will.” As if to underscore his determination, the Chevy rolled by a downed Confederate bomber. Behind a barricade of boards on sawhorses, technicians swarmed over the airplane, partly to see if the enemy had come up with anything new and partly to salvage whatever they could.

“Oh, yeah-I think we can whip ’em, too,” Morrell said. “But we have to occupy them once we do. Otherwise, they’ll just start rearming on the sly the way they did after the Great War.”

John Abell nodded. “You and I are on the same page, all right.” He let out a small chuckle; they’d known each other for close to thirty years, and that wasn’t the kind of thing either one of them said every day. Then he went on, “Plans for doing that are already being prepared.”

“Good. Are the planners working out how much it’ll cost us?” Morrell asked. Abell made a questioning noise. Morrell explained: “They hate us down there. They hate us bad. Maybe they hate their own Negroes worse, but maybe they don’t, too. And it’s awful easy to make a guerrilla war hurt occupiers these days. Auto bombs. People bombs. Land mines. Time bombs. These goddamn newfangled rockets. It was bad when we tried to hold down Houston and Kentucky. It’ll be worse now. ‘Freedom!’” He added the last word with sour emphasis.

General Abell looked pained-not so much for the wit, Morrell judged, as for what lay behind it. “Maybe it’s a good thing you’re here for more than one reason,” Abell said. “You ought to write an appreciation with all that in mind.”

“No one will appreciate it if I do,” Morrell said.

That made Abell look more pained still. But he said, “You might also be surprised. We’re looking at this. We’re looking at it very seriously, because we think we need to. If you point out some pitfalls, that will be to everyone’s advantage-except the Confederates’, of course.”

He was serious. The War Department was serious, then: whatever else you could say about John Abell, he made a good weather vane. “If we occupy the CSA, we won’t even pretend to be nice people any more,” Morrell warned. “It’ll be like Utah, only more so. We’ll have to kill anybody who gives us a hard time, and maybe kill the guy’s brother-in-law to make sure he doesn’t give us a hard time afterwards.”

“That is the working assumption, yes,” Abell agreed matter-offactly.

Morrell let out a soft whistle. “Lord!” he said. “If the Confederates are killing off their own Negroes the way we say they are-”

“They are.” Abell’s voice went hard and flat. “That’s not just propaganda, General. They really are doing it.”

However many times Morrell had heard about that, he didn’t want to believe it. Because the Confederates fought clean on the battlefield, he wished they played fair with their own people, too. But Abell’s certainty was hard not to credit. Sighing, Morrell went on, “Well, if they’re doing that, and if we kill off any whites who get out of line, people are liable to get thin on the ground down there.”

“Yes, that’s true.” Spring was here, but Abell remained blizzard-cold. “And so?”

He envisioned massacre as calmly as Jake Featherston did. The only difference was, he might let whites in the CSA live if they stayed quiet. Featherston killed off Negroes whether they caused trouble or not-his assumption was that Negroes were trouble, period. The distinction didn’t seem enormous. Morrell clung to it nonetheless.

“Either this town was already as beat-up as it could be or it hasn’t taken a whole lot of new damage since the last time I was here,” he remarked.

“The Confederates still come over,” Abell said. “Maybe not so much-and we can hurt them more when they do.”

“That sounds good,” Morrell said.

But when he got to the War Department, he went underground-far underground. Brigadier General Abell had to vouch for him before he even got into the battered building. The stars on his shoulders meant nothing to the guards at the entrance. That was how it should be, as far as Morrell was concerned. “No one has been able to blow himself up inside yet,” Abell said with what sounded like pride.

They went down endless flights of stairs. Morrell revised his notions about whether people around here ever got exercise. Climbing those stairs on the way back up would be no joke. “How close have they come?” he asked.

“Somebody dressed like a major took out a guard crew at the eastern entrance a couple of weeks ago,” Abell answered. “One of the men there must have seen something he didn’t like, and so…”

“Yeah. And so,” Morrell said. “I wonder how long it’ll be before they start using two-man suicide crews. The first fellow blows himself up, then the next one waits till the place is crowded before he uses his bomb-either that or he uses the confusion to sneak into wherever he really wants to go. It works with auto bombs; I know the Negroes in the CSA have done it. It might work with people bombs, too.”

“You’re just full of happy thoughts this morning, aren’t you?” John Abell said. “Well, put that in your appreciation, too. If you can think of it, we have to believe those Mormon bastards can, too.” He made a sour face. “Probably not going to be many people left alive in Utah by the time that’s all done, either.”

“No,” Morrell agreed. His own name for planning had suffered when a Great War attack against the rebels there didn’t go as well as it might have. He was banished from the General Staff back to the field then-a fate that dismayed him much less than his banishers thought it would. He said, “One thing-if we need to sow the place with salt, we won’t have to go very far to get it.”

“Er-no.” Abell didn’t know what to make of foolishness. He never had. To Morrell’s relief, he left the stairwell before they got all the way to China. “The map room is this way,” he said, reviving a little. Separate a General Staff officer from his maps and he was only half a man.

Officers ranging in rank from captain to major general pored over maps on tables and walls. Those maps covered the U.S.-C.S. frontier from Sonora all the way to the Atlantic. Some of the men in green-gray used their pointers decorously, like schoolteachers. Others plied them with brio, like orchestra conductors. Still others might have been knights swinging swords: they slashed and hacked at the territory they wanted to conquer.

Morrell was a slasher himself. He grabbed a pointer from a bin that looked like an archer’s quiver and advanced on a map showing the border between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. “This is what I want to do,” he said, and executed a stroke that would have disemboweled the Confederacy if it went across the real landscape instead of a map.

John Abell’s pale eyebrows rose. “You don’t think small, do you?”

“I’ve been accused of a lot of things, but rarely that,” Morrell said. “We can do it, you know. We should have started building up a little sooner, but I really think we can do it.”

Abell studied the map. He borrowed the pointer from Morrell and walked over to another map. His slash was as surgical as Morrell’s, if less melodramatic. “This would be your follow-up?” he inquired.

“Absolutely.” Morrell set a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “If we’re thinking along the same lines, chances are this will really work, because we never do that. Or we never did-now it’s twice in just a little while.”

“More likely we’re both deluded,” the General Staff officer replied. Morrell laughed, hoping Abell was joking. Abell studied the map himself. “This may be a two-year campaign, you know, not just one.”

“That’s…possible,” Morrell said reluctantly. “But I don’t think the Confederates will have a whole lot more than wind and air once we breach their front. They shot their bolt, and they hurt us, but they didn’t quite kill us. Now it’s our turn, and let’s see how they like playing defense.”

“Defense is cheaper than offense,” Abell warned. “And they have some new toys of their own. These multiple rocket launchers are very unpleasant.” He hadn’t come within a hundred miles of those rocket launchers-he was that kind of soldier-but he spoke with authority even so.

“Where are our new toys?” Morrell asked.

“I thought you might be wondering about that.” With the air of a stage magician plucking a rabbit from a hat, John Abell took a folded sheet of paper out of his breast pocket. “Tell me what you think about this.”

Morrell paused to put on reading glasses, a concession to age he hated but couldn’t do without. He unfolded the paper and skimmed through it. The more he read, the wider his smile got. “Well, well,” he said. “This is more like it! But there isn’t anything about when they’ll be ready. Are we talking about soon, or is this in the great by-and-by?”

“Soon,” Abell said. “Immediately, as a matter of fact. They’re coming off the lines in Pontiac-and in Denver-even as we speak. Whatever you do this summer, you’ll be able to use them.”

“That’s the best news I’ve had in quite a while,” Morrell said. “Quite a while. We’ve always had to play catch-up to Confederate armor. If we’ve got better barrels for a change, that just makes it more likely we can give them a good sickle slice and cut ’em off at the roots.”

“Depending on what they’re doing themselves along these lines,” Abell said. “Our intelligence isn’t perfect.”

“Really? I never would have guessed,” Morrell said. Abell gave him a sour stare. But with that piece of paper in his hand, with the idea for that campaign in his head, Irving Morrell wasn’t inclined to pick a fight with his own side. “Perfect or not, General,” he went on, “we’ll manage. I really think we will.”

Confederate shells crashed down outside of Lubbock. Inside the Texas town, Major General Abner Dowling was not a happy man. After Lubbock fell to his Eleventh Army, he’d hoped he could go on biting chunks out of west Texas, but it didn’t work out like that. The Confederates, to his surprise-to everybody’s surprise-threw fresh troops into the fight, and those men didn’t seem to care whether they lived or died. They weren’t here in more than brigade strength, but that was plenty to stabilize the line and even to push U.S. forces back toward Lubbock.

Major Angelo Toricelli stuck his head into Dowling’s office. It did belong to a bank manager, but he took a powder before U.S. troops occupied Lubbock. “Sir, you said you wanted to question one of those Confederate fanatics,” Toricelli said. “We’ve got one for you.”

“Do you?” Dowling brightened fractionally. “Well, bring him in. Maybe we’ll have a better notion of what we’re up against.”

His adjutant saluted. “Yes, sir.”

In came a large, burly Confederate soldier, escorted by three large, burly U.S. soldiers with submachine guns. The Confederate had two stripes on his tunic sleeve. Tunic and trousers weren’t the usual C.S. butternut, but a splotchy fabric in shades of tan and brown ranging from sand to mud. “Who are you?” Dowling asked.

“Sir, I am Assistant Troop Leader Lee Rodgers, Freedom Party Guards,” the prisoner said proudly. He recited his pay number.

“Assistant Troop Leader?” Dowling pointed to Rodgers’ chevrons. “You look like a corporal to me.”

“Sir, they are equivalent ranks,” Rodgers said. “The Freedom Party Guards have their own rank structure. This is to show that they are an elite.” He still sounded proud. He also sounded as if he was rattling off something he’d had to learn by rote.

Dowling had heard that before, though he didn’t know the guards actually went into combat. He thought they were just prison warders and secret policemen and Freedom Party muscle. But they fought, all right, and they fought well. Their tactics left something to be desired, but not their pluck.

“What’s your unit?” Dowling asked.

“Sir, I am Assistant Troop Leader Lee Rodgers, Freedom Party Guards.” Rodgers gave Dowling his pay number again. “Under the Geneva Convention, I don’t have to tell you anything else.”

He was right, of course. Sometimes that mattered more than it did other times. Had Dowling thought Rodgers held vital information, he might have squeezed him. There were ways to do it that technically didn’t violate the Convention. As things were, though, Dowling only asked, “Do you tell the Negroes in that prison camp down the road about their rights under the Geneva Convention?”

“No, sir,” Rodgers answered without hesitation. “They aren’t foreign prisoners. They’re internal enemies of the state. We have the right to do whatever we need to do with them.” He eyed Dowling. “They might as well be Mormons.”

He was sharper than the average corporal. If the Freedom Party Guards really were an elite, Dowling supposed that made sense. “We follow the Geneva Convention with the Mormons we capture,” Dowling said, which was-mostly-true. Then again, the Mormons had more than a few female fighters. They generally fought to the death. When they didn’t, U.S. soldiers often avenged themselves in a way they wouldn’t with Mormon men. That was against regulations and officially discouraged, which didn’t mean it didn’t happen.

Assistant Troop Leader Lee Rodgers only snorted. “If you do, it just means you’re weak and degenerate. Enemies of the state deserve whatever happens to them.” That sounded like another lesson learned by heart.

“How many Freedom Party Guards units are in combat?” Dowling asked.

“More every day,” Rodgers said, which gave the U.S. general something to worry about without giving him any real information. The prisoner folded his right hand into a fist and set it on his heart. “Freedom!” he shouted.

The U.S. soldiers guarding him growled and hefted their weapons. Rodgers seemed unafraid, or else more trusting than most new POWs. Dowling scowled. “Take him away,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” one of the men in green-gray said. “Shall we teach him not to mouth off, too?”

“Never mind,” Dowling said. “We’ll see how mouthy he is when we start advancing again.” That seemed to satisfy the soldiers. They weren’t more than ordinarily rough with the Freedom Party Guard, at least where Dowling could see them. The general commanding Eleventh Army sighed. “He’s a charmer, isn’t he?”

“Yes, sir,” Major Toricelli said. “That’s why you wanted to see him, isn’t it?”

“I wonder if they’re all like that. All the Party Guards, I mean,” Dowling said.

“Well, they sure fight like it’s going out of style,” his adjutant answered. “Those people are fanatics, and the Freedom Party is taking advantage of it.”

“Huzzah,” Dowling said sourly. “Do you suppose we have to worry about them turning into people bombs? That’s what fanatics do these days, it seems like.”

Toricelli looked startled. “Hadn’t thought of that, sir. They haven’t done it yet, if they’re going to.”

“Well, that’s good. I suppose it is, anyhow,” Dowling said. “Of course, maybe they just haven’t thought of it yet. Or maybe they’re going to put on civilian clothes instead of those silly-looking camouflage outfits and start looking for the biggest crowds of our soldiers they can find.”

“Or maybe they’ll start looking for you, sir,” Toricelli said. “The Confederates like to assassinate our commanders.”

“I know I’m not irreplaceable.” Dowling’s voice was dry. “I suspect the Confederates can figure it out, too. Besides, how would they get me? I’m not about to go strolling the streets of Lubbock.” He yawned. “I’d bore myself to death if I did.”

Lubbock held many more people than the other west Texas towns Dowling’s troops held for the USA. It wasn’t much more exciting. And the people here were as stubbornly pro-Confederate as in those small towns. When this part of Texas was the U.S. state of Houston, there were collaborators hereabouts. But they’d had the sense to get out when Jake Featherston conned Al Smith into a plebescite that returned Houston to Texas and the CSA. The ones who didn’t have that kind of sense ended up in camps themselves.

Under both the Stars and Stripes and the Stars and Bars (whose display now violated martial law), Lubbock had been a dry town. Dowling tried to win some popularity among local drinkers by declaring it wet. A couple of saloons opened up-and a minister promptly petitioned him to close them down.

The Reverend Humphrey Selfe looked as if he’d never had a happy thought in his life. He was long and lean, all vertical lines. He wore stark white and funereal black. His voice sounded like that of a bullfrog that had just lost its mother. “Wine is a mocker,” he told Dowling, aiming a long, skinny forefinger at him like the barrel of an automatic rifle. “Strong drink is raging.”

“Judge not, lest ye be judged,” Dowling answered-he’d loaded up with his own set of quotations ahead of time.

Reverend Selfe glowered. He was good at glowering. His physiognomy gave him a head start, but he had talent, too. “Do you make sport of me?” he demanded, as if he’d take Dowling out behind the woodshed if the answer was yes.

Dowling, however, declined to be intimidated by a west Texas preacher skinny enough to dive down a soda straw. “Not at all,” he lied. “But you need something more than fire and brimstone to tell me why a man shouldn’t be able to buy a shot or a bottle of beer if he feels like it.”

“Because God says drinking is a sin,” Selfe said. “I was trying to illustrate that for you.”

“But He also says things like, ‘And the roof of thy mouth like the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly,’” Dowling said-sweetly. “How do you pick and choose? Remember, ‘Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake.’”

Humphrey Selfe looked like a man who needed wine for his stomach’s sake. He certainly looked like a man whose stomach pained him. “You are a sinner!” he thundered.

“I shouldn’t wonder if you’re right,” Dowling answered, fondly recalling a certain sporting house in Salt Lake City. “But then, who isn’t? I have at least as many quotations that say it’s all right to drink as you do to say it’s wrong. Shall we go on, sir? I’ll show you.”

“Sinner!” Selfe said again. “Even the Devil can quote Scripture for his purposes.”

“No doubt,” Dowling said. “Which of us do you suppose he’s speaking through? And how do you aim to prove it one way or the other?”

“You do mock me!” the pastor said.

Dowling shook his head. He was enjoying himself, even if the Reverend Selfe wasn’t. “No, you said wine was a mocker,” he said. “I haven’t had any wine for weeks.” He didn’t mention strong drink, lest Selfe start raging. “Shall we go on with our discussion? It was getting interesting, don’t you think?”

Humphrey Selfe wasn’t interested in discussing. Like a lot of people, he wanted to lay down what he saw as the law. “I shall denounce you from the pulpit!” he said furiously.

“Remember the line about rendering unto Caesar, too, your Reverence,” Dowling said. “Lubbock is under martial law. If you try to incite riot, rebellion, or uprising, I promise you’ll be sorry.”

“I shall preach on the subject of saloons,” Selfe said.

“You do that,” Dowling told him. “I’m sure they can use the advertising. It will be fascinating to see how many of your congregants-is that the word?-decide to wet their whistles once you let them know where they can.”

The Reverend Selfe left most abruptly. The way he slammed the door, a large shell might have gone off. Major Toricelli opened the door again-to Dowling’s surprise, it was still on its hinges-and asked, “What did you do to him?”

“Talked about the Scriptures,” Dowling answered. “Really, there’s no making some people happy.”

“Uh-huh,” Angelo Toricelli said. “Why do I think you made a nuisance of yourself…sir?”

“Because you know me?” Dowling suggested. Then he added, “Sunday, we’ll need people listening to the quarrelsome fool’s sermon. If he goes overboard, we’ll make sure he pays for it.”

“That will be a pleasure,” Toricelli said.

After his adjutant withdrew once more, Dowling cursed. He’d wanted to ask the Reverend Humphrey Selfe what he thought of that camp for Negroes down by Snyder. Then he shrugged. Odds were the preacher would have said he’d never heard of the place. Odds were that would be a big, juicy lie, but Dowling wouldn’t be able to prove it.

More C.S. artillery came in. Some of those rounds sounded as if they were hitting in town, not just on the southern outskirts. Maybe, Dowling thought hopefully, they’ll knock Reverend Selfe’s church flat. He laughed. Who said he wasn’t an optimist?

Another downstate Ohio town. Having grown up in Toledo, First Sergeant Chester Martin looked on the southern part of his own state with almost as much scorn as a Chicagoan viewed downstate Illinois. Maybe people down here didn’t marry their cousins, but they were liable to fool around with them-so he uncharitably thought, anyhow.

Hillsboro had a couple of foundries and a couple of dairy plants. It sat on a plateau in the middle of Highland County. Because it lay on high ground, the Confederates were hanging on to it as an artillery base to shell the U.S. forces advancing from the north and east.

Martin was frustrated at the way the war in southern Ohio was going. “We should have trapped all the Confederates in the state,” he grumbled as he waited for water to boil for his instant coffee. “We should have given them the same business we gave the butternut bastards in Pittsburgh.”

“Isn’t there a difference, Sarge?” asked one of the privates huddled around the little campfire.

“Like what?” Chester said. What was the younger generation coming to? When he was a buck private, he wouldn’t have dared talk back to a first sergeant.

“When they were in Pittsburgh, they had orders not to pull back till after it was too late and they couldn’t,” the kid answered. “Here, they are falling back-looks like they’ll try and make the fight on their side of the Ohio.”

“Everybody thinks he belongs on the damn General Staff,” Chester said. But that wouldn’t quite do. “Well, Rohe, when you’re right, you’re right. I forgot they had those orders, and it does make a difference.”

Somewhere off to the left and ahead, a Confederate fired a short burst from one of their submachine guns. A U.S. machine gun answered. So did a couple of shots from the guys with the Springfields who helped protect the machine-gun crew. Another Confederate fired, this one with an automatic rifle. The machine gun answered again. Silence fell.

By then, Chester and the rest of the soldiers around the fire had their weapons in their hands, ready to hurry to help the machine-gun position if they had to. The Confederates in front of Hillsboro defended aggressively, probing as if they intended to go over to the attack any minute now. Martin didn’t think they would, but you never could tell.

“Gotta hand it to those bastards,” said one of the privates by the fire. “They still have their peckers up.” That wasn’t far from what Chester was thinking.

But brash Private Rohe said, “Yeah, well, I wish I did.”

That got a laugh. One of the other men said, “Hey, you can’t get laid around here, you ain’t tryin’. These Ohio broads are mighty glad-I mean mighty glad-we ran off those butternut bastards.”

Several men nodded. From what Chester had seen, the private wasn’t wrong. Some of the local women seemed convinced they had a patriotic duty to celebrate the return of the Stars and Stripes. “Do your prophylaxis, just like they’re whores,” he said: a sergeantly growl.

“They aren’t, though, Sarge. That’s what makes ’em so much fun-they’re nice gals,” Rohe said. More nods.

“You think you can’t come down venereal from laying a nice gal, you better think twice,” Chester said. “Remember, some of those ‘nice’ gals were probably screwing Featherston’s boys while they were here. They’re laying you to take the whammy off.”

“They wouldn’t do that!” Two young men spoke in identical dismay.

Chester laughed. “Hell they wouldn’t. There are collaborators on both sides. Always have been. Always will be.” He looked at his men. “You may be handsomer than the bastards in butternut-but if you are, the Confederacy’s got more trouble than it knows what to do with.”

The infantrymen jeered at him. He sassed them back. If they were laughing and loose, they’d fight better. They didn’t worry about anything like that, but he did. That was why he had those stripes, and the rockers under them.

Airplanes droned by overhead. Chester and the rest of the men looked for the nearest hole, in case those airplanes carried the Confederate battle flag. But they unloaded their ordnance on Hillsboro. Great clouds of smoke and dust rose above the town.

“Hope our people got out of there,” Rohe said, eyeing the devastation a couple of miles away.

Some of the locals probably-no, certainly-hadn’t. War worked that way. U.S. soldiers and armored vehicles started moving toward Hillsboro. Chester Martin sighed. He knew what would happen next. And it did. Lieutenant Wheat called, “Come on, men! Now that we’ve got the Confederates softened up, it’s time to drive them out of there once and for all!”

Chester heaved himself to his feet. “You heard the man,” he said. “Let’s get moving. Stay on your toes as we move forward. The Confederates may not be as beat up as we hope they are.”

He feared they wouldn’t be. He’d seen too many massive bombardments in the Great War yield little or nothing. He wouldn’t be surprised to see the same thing all over again here.

Rohe took point as the platoon moved up. He was small and skinny and sly, a good man to spot trouble before he tripped over it. The guys Chester had lugging the platoon’s machine guns were the ones who would have played the line in a football game. He would have been the sort to lug one himself in the last war.

He also had four or five men carrying captured C.S. automatic rifles. He blessed the extra firepower they gave. The whole platoon kept its eyes open for dead Confederates. Scrounging ammo never ceased-they didn’t want to run dry just when they needed it most.

They’d got about halfway to Hillsboro when mortar rounds started falling out of the sky. “Down!” Chester yelled. “Dig in!” There were plenty of shell holes that needed only minimal improvement to become foxholes. Some of them were already pretty good. Chester dove into one of those. Dirt flew as if he were part mole. Pretty good wasn’t good enough. He wanted outstanding.

The veterans in the platoon all dug in as fast as he did. New replacements stood around gaping and wondering what the hell was going on. Nobody’d had time to show them the ropes, and they didn’t own enough combat experience to do what needed doing without having to think about it. The extra few seconds they stayed upright cost them.

One was gruesomely killed. Two more went down wounded, both screaming their heads off. “Corpsman!” other soldiers shouted. “Over here, corpsman!” A veteran scrambled out of his hole to help a wounded rookie, and another fragment bit him. He howled in pain and howled curses at the same time.

In due course, U.S. artillery thundered. The mortars fell silent. Biding their time, Martin thought gloomily. But he was one of the first ones out of those newly enlarged and improved holes. “Come on!” he called to the rest of the men. “We’ve got a job to do.”

It was a nasty, unpleasant job. The ground over which they advanced offered little cover. To the Confederates in Hillsboro, they had to look like bugs walking across a plate. Smoke rounds helped, but only so much. If Featherston’s boys had one of those rocket launchers up there, they could put a hell of a crimp in anybody’s morning.

U.S. barrels rattled forward. Chester always liked to see them. They could do things infantry simply couldn’t. And they always drew enemy fire away from foot soldiers. He wasn’t the only one who knew they were dangerous-the Confederates did, too.

One of the things the barrels could do was lay down more smoke. That helped shield the advancing men in green-gray from the Confederates on the high ground. The Confederates kept shooting, but now they had trouble finding good targets. Chester trotted on, ducking and throwing himself into shell holes whenever he thought he had to.

Out of the smoke loomed a man in the wrong uniform: dirty butternut instead of dirty green-gray, a helmet of not quite the right shape. Chester’s Springfield swung toward the Confederate’s chest. The enemy soldier dropped-in fact, violently cast away-his submachine gun and threw up his hands. “Don’t shoot, Yankee!” he moaned. “You got me!”

“What do we do with him, Sarge?” one of Martin’s men asked.

Chester thought, but not for long. They didn’t really have time to deal with POWs… “Take him on up the road,” he said.

“Right,” the U.S. soldier said. He gestured with his Springfield. “Come on, you.” Pathetically eager, the prisoner came. Martin went on advancing. A shot rang out behind him, and then another one. He swore softly. It was too bad, but they just didn’t have the time. If he’d told his men to take the Confederate to the rear, that would have removed at least one of them from the fight. And so he used the other phrase, and the man was dead. At least he wouldn’t have known he was about to die till it happened. That was something, though not much.

Martin was sure the Confederates played the game the same way. It was too bad, but what could you do? If taking a prisoner didn’t inconvenience or endanger you, you’d do it. Why not? But if it did…It was a tough war, and it didn’t get any easier.

Shame he didn’t have one of their automatic rifles-submachine-gun cartridges don’t matter so much, Martin thought. Well, the guy who plugged him will get his cigarettes and whatever else he has that’s worth taking. And that was what a man’s life boiled down to: cartridges and cigarettes. Yeah, it sure was a tough war.

Artillery and the barrels pounded the Confederates ahead. The gun bunnies were in good form; hardly any rounds fell short. More soldiers in butternut came out of their holes with hands high. Chester did let them surrender. When men gave up in a group, it was too easy to have something go wrong if you tried to get rid of all of them at once.

Hillsboro fell that afternoon. The enemy pulled back when U.S. barrels threatened to cut off his line of retreat to the Ohio. He did a professional job of it, moving his guns out hitched to trucks and commandeered motorcars. He even paused to fire a few Parthian shots as he went south.

“We licked him here,” Private Rohe said, inspecting what was left of Hillsboro. “We licked him, yeah, but he ain’t licked yet.”

Chester was thinking about the same thing. “As long as we keep licking him, the rest doesn’t matter. Sooner or later, he’ll be licked whether he likes it or not.”

“Yeah?” Rohe weighed that, then nodded. “Yeah. Sounds right, Sarge. So when do we go over the Ohio?”

“Beats me,” Chester said. “Let’s bundle the other guys across first. Then we can worry about us, right?” Rohe nodded again.

Major Jerry Dover watched from the south bank of the Ohio as trucks and infantrymen crossed the bridge back into Kentucky. The span was laid about a foot below the surface of the river. The damnyankees still hadn’t figured out that trick. When no one was on the bridge, it was invisible from the air. U.S. bombers didn’t keep coming over and trying to blow it to hell and gone.

The foot soldiers on the bridge looked like men walking on water. Dover turned to Colonel Travis W.W. Oliphant and said, “If we keep it up, sir, we can start our own religion.”

“What’s that?” Colonel Oliphant didn’t get it. I might have known, Dover thought with a mental sigh. Then the light dawned on his superior. Oliphant scowled. “I don’t find that amusing, Major. I don’t find that amusing at all,” he said. “I find it the next thing to blasphemous, as a matter of fact.”

“Sorry, sir,” Dover lied. Damned stuffed shirt. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know as much. He did. Any man who got huffy over not one initial but two couldn’t be anything but a stuffed shirt.

Colonel Oliphant went on trumpeting and wiggling his ears and pawing the ground. After a little while, Dover stopped listening to him. He was watching the stream of men and machines to make sure all the field kitchens safely returned to the CSA. Oliphant was supposed to be doing the same thing. He was too busy ranting.

“If we make God turn His face away from us in disgust, how can we prevail?” he demanded.

Dover thought about Negroes disappearing in Atlanta. He thought about the people he lost from the Huntsman’s Lodge in cleanouts. He wondered what was going on since he put on the uniform and went away. Was Xerxes still there? He could hope, but that was all he could do. “Sir, do you know about the camps?” he asked Colonel Oliphant in a low voice.

“What?” The other officer stared at him as if he were suddenly spouting Choctaw. “What are you talking about?”

“The camps,” Dover repeated patiently. “The camps where niggers go in but they don’t come out.”

He wondered if Travis W.W. Oliphant would deny that any such things existed. A little to his surprise, Oliphant didn’t. “Yes, I know about them. So what?” he said.

“Well, sir, if God will put up with those, I don’t think He’ll get too disgusted about a bad joke of mine,” Dover said.

Oliphant turned red. “The one has nothing to do with the other, Major,” he said stiffly. “The Negroes deserve everything that we’re giving them. Your so-called joke, on the other hand, was completely gratuitous.”

“God told you the Negroes have it coming, did He?” Jerry Dover asked.

“See here, Dover, you don’t have the right attitude,” Colonel Oliphant said. “Whose side are you on, anyway?”

“I’m on the Confederacy’s side…sir,” Dover answered. “If you think a stupid joke will put us in bad with God, I’m not so sure you are, though.” He’d managed the Huntsman’s Lodge too damn long. He wasn’t inclined to take guff from anybody, even if the guff-slinger wore three stars on either side of his collar while Dover had only one.

“I will write you up for this insubordination, Major,” Oliphant said in a low, furious voice. “You’ll get a court-martial, by God-yes, by God!”

He failed to impress Dover, who said, “Go ahead. One of three things will happen. They’ll throw my ass in the stockade, and I’ll be safer than you are. Or they’ll take the uniform off my back and ship me home, and I’ll be a lot safer than you are. Or-and here’s my bet-they’ll tear you a new asshole for wasting their time with this picayune shit, and they’ll leave me the hell alone. So sure, court-martial me, Colonel. Be my guest. I’ll thank you for it.”

Travis W.W. Oliphant’s mouth opened and closed several times. He might have been a freshly hooked perch. Subordinates were supposed to react to the threat of a court-martial with terror, not gloating anticipation. After his wordless tries, he finally managed to choke out, “You’re not a proper soldier at all, Dover.”

“That depends, sir. If you want me to keep people fed, I’ll do it like nobody’s business,” Dover said. “If you feed me bullshit and tell me it’s breakfast, I’m gonna puke it all over your shoes.”

Colonel Oliphant retreated in disorder, shaking his head. No summons to a court-martial ever came. Dover hadn’t expected one.

Since he wasn’t going to the stockade, he had plenty to do. The Confederate units that got out of Ohio were in a horrible tangle. They had to try to improvise a defense where they’d thought they wouldn’t need to. The CSA hadn’t had much time to fortify Kentucky before the war broke out, and neglected it afterwards. Confederate thinking was surely that Ohio was more important.

But now Ohio was back in the damnyankees’ hands. Whatever happened next would happen because the United States wanted it to, not because the Confederate States did. How good was the Confederacy at playing defense? Nobody knew, probably including Jake Featherston.

When supplies didn’t come up from farther south fast enough to suit him, Dover acquired an evil reputation with farmers all over northern Kentucky. He requisitioned what he needed, paying in Confederate scrip.

Some of the farmers’ screams reached Richmond. They got Dover a letter of commendation in his promotion jacket. Colonel Oliphant ignored it. Colonel Oliphant ignored Jerry Dover as much as he could from then on out, too.

That suited Dover down to the ground. He got more work done without Colonel Oliphant than he would have with him. He moved depots closer to the river than Oliphant liked, too. He didn’t think Oliphant was a coward-he’d seen the man blazing away at strafing U.S. fighters with a submachine gun, cool as you please. But the colonel’s ideas about logistics formed during the Great War, and didn’t move forward with the easy availability of telephones and wireless sets and trucks.

Front-line soldiers appreciated what Dover did, regardless of whether Travis W.W. Oliphant understood it. Dover got to the front himself whenever he could. The best way to make sure things worked as you wanted them to was to check them with your own eyes. He knew that from the restaurant business.

And he promptly caught one potbellied supply sergeant diverting rations to the local civilians-for a nice little rakeoff, of course. Of course. He landed on the enterprising noncom like a thousand-pound bomb. After the sergeant went off in irons-nobody wasted time being nice to mere noncoms-things elsewhere along the line of the Ohio tightened up remarkably.

Because of all his time at the Huntsman’s Lodge, Dover knew better than to believe he’d worked miracles. He didn’t labor under the delusion that he’d changed human nature. Thieves and grifters were going to keep right on being thieves and grifters. But he forced them to be careful for a while, which was better than a poke in the eye with a carrot.

“Way to go, Major,” a first lieutenant running a company right on the southern bank of the river told him. “We’ve got more grub here than I reckoned we’d ever see.”

“Good,” Dover said. “Good you’ve got it now, I mean. Not so good you gave up thinking you ever would.”

“Yeah, well, what can you do? Shit happens,” the lieutenant answered. “We were up on the other side of the border for a long time. We could swap smokes with the damnyankees for some of their rations, and we could requisition on the farms when we ran low. But that don’t go over so good when you’re requisitioning from your own people. So we were making do and getting by down here, but it’s a damn sight better now.”

“Dammit, this country grows enough food. This country cans enough food,” Dover said-and requisitioning from his own side bothered him not a bit. “We ought to be able to get that stuff to the people who need it the most.”

“We ought to be able to do all kinds of shit,” the lieutenant said, and paused to light a cigarette. “We ought to still be up at Lake Erie. We ought to still be in Pittsburgh. Fuck, we ought to be in Philadelphia.” He looked at Dover. He did everything but blow smoke in Dover’s face. “And if you want to report me for defeatism, go right ahead…sir. It’s not like I give a good goddamn.”

“I’m not going to report you. I think you’re right.” Only later did Dover wonder if the other officer was trying to entrap him. No hard-faced men in gray trenchcoats swooped down on the tent where he slept during the wee small hours. No one hauled him away for bright lights and hard knocks and endless rounds of questions.

That didn’t keep him from almost getting killed. Just as the Confederates were trying to strengthen their defenses on the southern bank of the Ohio, so the damnyankees were building up north of the river. The first two summers of the war, the Confederates struck when and where they chose. This time, the United States enjoyed the initiative. What they would do with it remained to be seen.

One of the things they did with it was strike at the C.S. positions south of the Ohio from the air. Bombs blasted field fortifications. Fighters streaked low to shoot up anything that moved. Confederate airplanes were bound to be doing the same thing on the other side of the river, but that didn’t help Dover when a Yankee fighter strafed his Birmingham.

“Oh, shit!” the driver said when he saw the airplane in the rearview mirror. He jammed the gas pedal to the floor, which shoved Dover back in his seat. Then he did something his passenger thought smarter than hell, even if it almost put Dover through the windshield: he screeched the brakes, hoping to make the fighter overshoot.

It almost worked, too. Most of the U.S. fighter’s machine-gun bullets chewed up the asphalt in front of the Birmingham. Most-but not all. A.50-caliber slug almost blew off the driver’s head. Bone and blood and brains showered Jerry Dover. Two more bullets, or maybe three, slammed into the engine block. Flames and smoke spurted up from under the hood.

If the driver weren’t already stopping, the auto would have gone off the road at high speed, and probably rolled over and exploded. As things were, it limped onto the soft shoulder. Dover yanked open the door, jumped out, and ran like hell. He managed to get clear before the fire reached the gas tank. A soft whoomp! and the Birmingham was an inferno.

“Jesus!” Dover looked down at himself. He was as spattered with gore as if he were wounded himself. He could smell it. His stomach heaved, but he kept breakfast down.

Looking back at the pyre that marked his driver’s last resting place, he felt guilty about not getting the man out. The rational part of his mind said that was ridiculous-you couldn’t possibly live with nothing left of your head from the ears north. He felt guilty even so, maybe for living where the other man died.

Another Birmingham painted butternut stopped. The officer inside stared from the burning motorcar to Jerry Dover. “You hurt, pal? You need a lift?” he asked.

“I’m all right. I do need a lift,” Dover answered automatically. Then he said, “Christ, what I really need is a drink.” The officer held up a silvered flask. Dover ran for the other Birmingham.

Cincinnatus Driver rolled into Cincinnati, Ohio. His name didn’t have anything much to do with the town, even if he was born in Covington, Kentucky, right across the Ohio River. Negroes in the CSA had long been in the habit of giving their babies fancy names, either from the days of ancient Greece and Rome or, less often, from the Bible. When you didn’t have much but your name to call your own, you got as much out of it as you could.

Cincinnati looked like hell. The Confederates made a stand here before pulling back across the Ohio into Covington. As the USA taught the CSA in Pittsburgh, attacking a built-up area could be hellishly expensive. The bastards in butternut did their damnedest to make it so here.

Great flocks of metallically twittering starlings darkened the sky as they rose when Cincinnatus’ truck convoy rolled by. The war didn’t bother them much, except for the ones unlucky enough to stop bullets or bomb or shell fragments. Those made only a tiny, tiny fraction of the total.

Back when Cincinnatus’ father was a little boy, there were flocks of passenger pigeons instead. Cincinnatus had seen only a handful of those; they were in a steep decline when he was a boy around the turn of the century. They were all gone now, every one of them. Confederate artillery fire killed the last surviving specimen, a female in the Cincinnati zoo, early in the Great War.

By the same token, he remembered starlings arriving in the area not long after the war ended. Some crazy Englishman brought them to the USA in the 1890s, and they’d moved west ever since. He wondered if they filled up some of the hole in the scheme of things that was left when passenger pigeons disappeared.

And then he had more urgent things to wonder about, like whether he’d live long enough to deliver the shells he was carrying in the back of his truck. The Confederates on the far side of the river went right on lobbing their own shells into the ruins of Cincinnati, trying to make them even more ruinous.

Fountains of upflung dirt and smoke rose from not nearly far enough away. Cincinnatus kept on driving. Why not? He was just as likely to stop a fragment standing still as he was moving forward.

The trucks in the convoy stayed well separated from one another. If a shell blew one of them to hell and gone, even one carrying munitions, the blast wouldn’t take out the trucks in front of and behind it. Everybody hoped it wouldn’t, anyhow.

He pulled to a stop in front of the city jail. A lot more than one shell had fallen on that squat, ugly building. The Confederates must have made a stand there. That made sense-a place designed to keep unfriendly people in would also be pretty good at keeping unfriendly people out.

When Cincinnatus got down from the cab of his truck, he was laughing to beat the band. “What’s so funny?” asked one of the other drivers, a white man named Waldo something. “Way you’re going on, anybody would think you did a couple months in there.” He jerked a thumb toward the wreckage of the jail. A big grin took the sting from his words.

“You ain’t so far wrong,” Cincinnatus answered. “Damn Confederates jugged me across the river, over in Covington. But when they went an’ exchanged me, they stopped here an’ got some other guys out, too. So I ain’t sorry to see this place catch hell, not even a little bit.”

“Suits me,” Waldo said. “The more jails they blow up, the happier I am. I’ve done stretches in too goddamn many of ’em. Never any big shit, but I like to drink, and when I drink I like to fight, and so…” His face showed that he’d caught a few lefts and rights, or maybe more than a few, as well as dishing them out. He sounded proud of his escapades. A moment later, in fact, he went on, “I wonder if they got any saloons open in what’s left of this town.”

“You sure you want to find out?” Cincinnatus asked. “You got the government tellin’ you what to do, they can give you a lot more grief if you get in trouble than some city police can.”

Waldo thought it over. He nodded. “Makes sense. Thanks.” If he’d left it there, everything would have been fine. But then he added, “You’re pretty goddamn smart for a nigger, you know?”

The worst part was, he meant it for a compliment. “Thanks a bunch,” Cincinnatus said sourly.

A few more 105s came whistling in, but none of them burst close to where swarms of young soldiers unloaded the trucks. Watching them, Cincinnatus remembered how he’d done the same thing during the Great War. A lot of years had landed on his shoulders since, a lot of years and that encounter with the motorcar he didn’t see before it almost killed him. He still didn’t remember getting hit. He didn’t suppose he ever would.

A second lieutenant who looked even younger than the soldiers doing pack-mule duty wandered through the unloading zone with a clipboard in his hands. It made him seem official, so official that Cincinnatus got suspicious. The Confederates would have no trouble putting one of their people in a U.S. uniform and sending him up here to see what he could see. They were supposed to do stuff like that all the time. Cincinnatus hoped the USA did it, too.

Then the young lieutenant talked to an officer who came down with the truck convoy. That made Cincinnatus feel better. A spy wouldn’t talk to anybody if he didn’t have to-or so it seemed to Cincinnatus, anyway. The older officer nodded. He said something; Cincinnatus was too far away to make out what.

“Driver!” the second lieutenant yelled, plainly reading the name from his clipboard. “Cincinnatus Driver!”

Alarm sleeted through Cincinnatus. What the devil did they want with him? And who were they, anyhow? “I’m here,” he said, and picked his way through the rubble over to the shavetail. “What’s up?”

“My superiors need to talk with you,” the baby-faced officer said. He wore green-and-white arm of service colors on his collar, a combination Cincinnatus hadn’t seen before. A badge-a wreath with the letters INT inside-gave him a pretty good idea of what those colors meant. Intelligence.

That made him feel better, not worse. He’d got out of Covington-and got out of its colored district-only a little while before. If the U.S. Army was looking for ways to use Covington’s Negroes, he had some ideas. He also had the names of people they could get in touch with-and names of people to stay away from at all costs.

Sentries in green-gray uniforms stood in front of what used to be an office building. The young lieutenant needed to exchange password and countersign with them before they let him in. Nobody trusted anybody these days. Cincinnatus hoped that was just as true on the side of the line where the men wore butternut.

A white-haired fellow in civilian clothes was talking with a lieutenant colonel and a major when Cincinnatus followed the lieutenant into the room where they sat. The man’s eyes were the light, almost golden brown of a hunting dog’s-a most unusual shade for a man. Cincinnatus stiffened. He knew those eyes anywhere, and the clever, engagingly homely face that housed them. Luther Bliss was trouble with a capital T.

When Kentucky belonged to the USA between the wars, Luther Bliss headed the Kentucky State Police, an outfit that hunted Confederate diehards and black radicals with equal enthusiasm. Cincinnatus spent almost two years in a Kentucky State Police jail. Bliss was a law unto himself, and paid attention to other law only when he felt like it.

He nodded to Cincinnatus now. “As long as you’re against the Freedom Party, we’re on the same side,” he said. To the officers, he added, “We’ve had our run-ins, Cincinnatus and me, but he’s all right. I’m glad his card came up.”

Cincinnatus wasn’t sure he was glad his card-what card?-turned up. Forced to choose between Luther Bliss and Jake Featherston, he would choose Bliss. No black man could possibly disagree there. Forced to choose between Bliss and anyone else-anyone else at all…But that wasn’t the choice he had.

Bliss went on, “I was hooked in with Lucullus Wood and the other colored activists, but only from the outside.” He brushed one hand across the back of the other, noting his own white skin. “Cincinnatus here, though, he knows all that stuff from the inside out.”

“Well, that’s what we’re looking for,” the major said. “We want to try to stir things up in Covington so the Confederates will be busy when we go over the river.”

“You gonna stir things up with the whites, too, or just with the blacks?” Cincinnatus asked.

“What business of yours is that?” the lieutenant colonel demanded in a voice like winter.

Cincinnatus scowled at him. When the Negro eyed Luther Bliss, he saw that the secret policeman understood what he was talking about. “Just the niggers rise up,” he told the light colonel, “you let the Freedom Party bastards put ’em down, an’ then you move. I know how you work. You get the CSA to solve your nigger problem for you, and your own hands stay nice an’ clean.”

The officer with the silver oak leaves on his shoulder straps gaped like a boated bream. Luther Bliss laughed. “You see, Ray?” he said. “He’s nobody’s fool. He didn’t come to town on a load of turnips.”

Cincinnatus had come to town on, or at least with, a load of 105mm shells. “You ain’t got no white folks to rise up, I ain’t talkin’ ’bout no niggers.” His own accent came out more strongly with every sentence. “They got enough troubles-they got too goddamn many troubles-without me givin’ ’em mo’.”

“You are insubordinate,” the major growled.

“Bet your ass,” Cincinnatus said proudly.

“Tell him what’s going on,” Luther Bliss advised. “He won’t blab. He never said anything to me that he shouldn’t have, and I squeezed him, too.”

“Most irregular,” the lieutenant colonel-Ray-muttered. Reluctantly, he said, “The unrest will involve members of both principal racial groupings in Covington.”

“He means whites and Negroes,” Luther Bliss put in.

“Why don’t he say so, then?” Cincinnatus asked. Bliss laughed. The lieutenant colonel looked irate and indignant. Cincinnatus didn’t care. If the man meant whites and Negroes, why did he have to hide it behind a bunch of fancy talk?

“You going to give us a hand?” Luther Bliss asked. “This’ll happen with you or without you. It may work a little better, kill more of the right people and not so many of the wrong ones, if you give us a hand. How does that sound?”

“Sounds like the best deal I’m gonna get,” Cincinnatus said. He talked about the Red network centered on Lucullus Wood’s barbecue shack. Bliss already knew a lot about that; he’d dealt with Lucullus himself. Cincinnatus also talked about the probable Confederate informers at the Brass Monkey, a saloon not far from his father’s house. He told the Intelligence officers everything he knew, and he hoped to heaven that it did some good.