The Grapple

V

With a theatrical flourish, Brigadier General John Wade pinned a Silver Star on Michael Pound’s chest. Then he pinned a small gold bar onto each shoulder strap on Pound’s new shirt. The division commander stuck out his hand. “Congratulations, Lieutenant Pound!” he said warmly. A flashbulb flared as a photographer immortalized the moment.

“Thank you, sir.” Pound feared he sounded as enthusiastic as he felt. He didn’t want to be an officer. He’d also done things a lot more dangerous than the ones that got him this medal. Nobody’d paid any attention to them, though. This time, the wounded Lieutenant Griffiths went on and on in writing about what a wonderful fellow he was. And so…He had the decoration, which he didn’t mind, and the promotion, which he did.

“You’ll have a platoon of barrels,” General Wade said. “I’m sure you’ll fight them as bravely and effectively as you fought your own machine after the commander got hurt.”

“I’ll do my best, sir.” Pound liked giving orders only a little better than he liked taking them. The other four barrel commanders in the platoon would be sergeants who didn’t want to hear from a lousy second lieutenant, even if Pound wasn’t your everyday shavetail. Getting them to pay attention to him would be a pain in the neck, or probably points south of the neck.

But then Wade said, “Because of your excellent service and your long experience, Lieutenant, we’ll give you a platoon of the Mark III machines. These are some of the first ones we have, just down from the factories in Michigan.”

Suddenly, Michael Pound didn’t mind the promotion. He didn’t mind the prospect of giving orders to sergeants who didn’t want to take them. He didn’t mind a thing. He tore off a salute that would have turned a drill sergeant green with envy. “Thank you very much, sir!” he exclaimed. “Are they here? Can I see them?” He’d heard about the new machines, but he had yet to set eyes on them.

Brigadier General Wade smiled. He was somewhere close to Pound’s age, with a chestful of medals and service ribbons-and with a scar on his face and a finger missing from his left hand that said he’d really and truly earned his decorations. “I know enthusiasm when I hear it, Lieutenant,” he said. “Why don’t you come with me?”

“Sir, I’d follow you anywhere,” Pound said, and John Wade laughed.

Hamilton, Ohio, was an industrial town of about 50,000 people, maybe a third of the way from Cincinnati up to Dayton. It sat in a bowl of hills on both sides of the Great Miami River. The west side of town was the nice side, or had been before the Confederates made a stand there. Wade had formally commissioned Pound in the Soldiers, Sailors, and Pioneers Memorial Building, a two-story structure of limestone blocks that housed a museum dedicated to U.S. wars. Two cannon from old Fort Hamilton stood in front of the building; the names of the men from Hamilton who’d served in the Mexican War, the War of Secession, the Second Mexican War, and the Great War were carved into the walls.

Now some new military hardware had joined those late-eighteenth-century guns. Michael Pound eyed the sleek lines of the new barrels with as much admiration as he would have given those of Daisy June Lee, even if of a slightly different sort. The armor on the green-gray machines-splotched here and there with darker green to help break up their outlines-was as well sloped as anything the Confederates had ever built. And that long 3?-inch gun would make any C.S. barrel, including the enemy’s latest and greatest, say uncle.

Brigadier General Wade looked as proud of the new barrels as if he’d designed them himself. “Well, Lieutenant,” he said genially, “what do you think?”

Pound knew what he was supposed to say. He was supposed to burble on about how wonderful the new barrels were and what a howling wilderness they would make of the Confederate States. If John Wade expected him to say things like that, it only went to show the general didn’t know his newest and most junior officer very well.

“Sir, they’re fine machines,” Pound said, and General Wade beamed-his new lieutenant was on the right track. Pound promptly proceeded to drive off it: “I’d like them a lot better if we had them at the beginning of the war. And we could have, you know.”

General Wade’s smile faded. “That wouldn’t have been easy,” he said, the geniality leaking out of his voice word by word. “In fact, I doubt it would have been possible.”

“Oh, yes, it would, sir.” Pound didn’t mind correcting an officer with a star on each shoulder strap-Wade was wrong, and anybody who was wrong needed correcting. (No wonder he went gray before making officer’s rank himself.) He went on, “We had everything we needed in place to build machines like this twenty years ago-and then we turned our backs on barrels, because they were too expensive and we probably wouldn’t need them any more. If we’d just followed up, this is where we would have been going into the war, this or better.”

“And what makes you so sure of that, Lieutenant?” Brigadier General Wade asked unwisely.

“Sir, I was General Morrell’s gunner at the Barrel Works in Fort Leavenworth-he was only a bird colonel back then, of course,” Pound answered. “I remember the prototype he designed. It was just a one-off, in mild steel, but it pointed straight ahead to those machines. About the only thing missing was the sloped armor, and that would have come. Or if it didn’t, we would have built thicker instead and used a stronger engine to haul around the extra weight.”

“I…see,” Wade said in slightly strangled tones. Officers often used those tones when talking to or about Michael Pound. Wade aimed a forefinger at him. “If you were there then, Lieutenant, why in God’s name aren’t you a major or a colonel by now?”

“I liked being a noncom.” Pound spread his hands, as if to say, There! Isn’t that simple? “I’ve turned down more promotions than you can shake a stick at. If you gave me any chance to do it, I would have turned this one down, too.”

“My God,” John Wade muttered. He’d never even dreamt of turning down a promotion. No one who aspired to high rank ever did. “Didn’t you ever want to use your expertise on a wider scale?”

“My expertise is barrel gunnery, sir-and everything that has to do with keeping a barrel running, too, but anybody who’s been in barrels a while gets good at that,” Pound said. “But I can only shoot one cannon at a time, and the gun doesn’t care whether I’m a sergeant or an officer. Besides, now that I’m going to be commanding a platoon, I won’t get the chance to do my own shooting any more.”

“My God,” Wade said again. “You’re an unusual man, Lieutenant. Don’t let anyone tell you any different.”

“I’ll shoot the next so-and-so who tries,” Pound agreed, which only seemed to fluster the division commander more. He went on, “When do we go into Kentucky and start chewing up the Confederates? Soon, I hope, so they don’t have much time to strengthen their defenses. We push southeast, maybe we can cut them in half.”

If General Wade gaped before, he downright goggled now. Pound had seen that expression on officers’ faces before. They often didn’t believe men in the ranks-or, in his case, just up from the ranks-could think on their own. Wade managed a ragged laugh. “I put bars on your shoulders, and you think you’re ready for the General Staff.”

“Oh, no, sir.” That might have sounded suitably modest had Pound left it there. But he didn’t: “I was wondering about this when I was still a sergeant. As long as we’ve got the initiative, we need to use it. Jake Featherston is the world’s biggest son of a bitch, but he understands that. Do we?”

John Wade gave him a wry grin. “If I tell you that, I tell you things I haven’t told some members of my own staff. You tend to your knitting there, and I’ll tend to mine. I don’t think you’ll end up disappointed.”

Michael Pound ended up disappointed with most of what his superiors did. Even he could see that saying so wouldn’t win him any points. And he did have new knitting to tend to. He saluted and said, “Yes, sir.” This time, Wade’s smile wasn’t wry. Pound smiled, too, if only to himself. Yes, they always liked that.

But the general wasn’t wrong. Without waiting for permission, Pound started crawling all over the new barrel. He eyed the driver’s seat and the bow gunner’s spot next to it. Then he went into the turret. He sat in the gunner’s seat, then got up from it with a sigh of real regret. Up till now, U.S. barrels were always outgunned. A U.S. machine’s main armament could defeat a C.S. barrel most of the time (though taking on a new-model C.S. barrel’s frontal armor with the 1?-inch gun on the oldest U.S. barrels was an invitation to suicide-you had to hit them from the flank to have any kind of chance). Now, though, he would have the advantage. This gun would penetrate enemy armor at ranges from which the Confederates couldn’t hope to reply.

He shook his head. He wouldn’t have the advantage. His gunner would. He’d be stuck telling other people what to do.

With another sigh, he sat down in the commander’s seat. He stood up so he could look out of the cupola. Seeing what was going on mattered more than maybe anything else on the battlefield. Sometimes, though, you would get killed if you tried to look out. He closed the cupola’s lid and peered through the built-in periscopes. The view wasn’t nearly so good, but it wasn’t hopeless, either.

This barrel happened to have a platoon commander’s wireless set like the one he’d be using. He studied that with extra care. He would have to keep track of four machines besides his own. They would have to become extensions of his will, all working together to give the bastards in butternut a good kick in the teeth.

He frowned thoughtfully. He’d never tried anything like this before. Maybe officers earned their money after all.

He climbed out of the turret with a certain sense of relief. Brigadier General Wade eyed him with amusement. “You’re thorough,” Wade said.

“Sir, it’s my neck,” Pound answered. Again, were he speaking to a less exalted personage, some other part of his anatomy would have occurred to him.

Yes, escaping the turret did bring relief with it. He felt as if he were leaving a platoon commander’s responsibilities behind. Logically, that was nonsense, but logic and feelings had little to do with each other. He peered down through the engine louvers at the powerplant. “Anything special I should know about the motor, sir?” he asked. “Have they found any gremlins?”

“Some growing pains with the fuel pump, I’ve heard,” Wade answered. “Engine seems fairly well behaved, though-it’s a scaled-up model of the one we’ve been using in the older barrels.”

“I thought so from the look of it,” Pound said. “Well, we’ll see how it goes. How soon will we see how it goes?” One more probe couldn’t hurt.

It also didn’t help much. Chuckling, General Wade said, “It won’t be too long,” and Pound had to make what he could of that.

Armstrong Grimes still had his platoon. No eager young second lieutenant had come out of the repple-depple to take his place. He would have bet the replacement depot had no eager young second lieutenants. He was still very young himself, but not very eager. Nobody who’d been in Utah for a while was eager any more except the Mormons. They were getting pounded to bits a block at a time, but they had no give in them.

A commendation letter sat in Armstrong’s file for capturing the corporal who turned out not to be a corporal. They’d promoted Yossel Reisen to sergeant for his part in that. Armstrong didn’t flabble about not getting bumped up to staff sergeant. For one thing, he cared more about coming out in one piece than he did about rank. And, for another, getting promoted up to sergeant was pretty easy. Adding a rocker to your stripes wasn’t.

His whole regiment was out of line for R and R, or what passed for R and R in Utah: real beds, food that didn’t come out of cans, hot showers, and a perimeter far enough out to make it hard for the Mormons to snipe at you or drop mortar bombs on your head. No women, but there was an NCOs’ club where Armstrong could buy beer. Rank did have its privileges. He enjoyed them while he could.

Now he couldn’t any more. In a clean uniform, he trudged back up toward the fighting. The dirty, ragged, unshaven men coming south for R and R of their own eyed him and his comrades with the scorn veterans gave to anybody who looked new and raw. “Does your mama know you’re here?” one of them jeered-the oldest gibe in the world.

“Ah, fuck you,” answered one of the privates in Armstrong’s platoon. It wasn’t even a challenge-more an assertion that the man who’d spoken wasn’t worth challenging.

The vet coming back understood that tone. “Sorry, buddy,” he said. “You didn’t look like you’d been through it before.”

“Yeah, well, fuck you anyway,” the private said. This time, he did smile when he said it.

“Come on, keep moving,” Armstrong said. “We’ve got so much to look forward to.”

“Funny,” Yossel said.

“Tell me about it,” Armstrong said. “I’m gonna grow a long blue beard and join the Engels Brothers.” That made his buddy shut up. Armstrong could see the wheels going round in Yossel’s head. He would be thinking that Armstrong had to know the Engels Brothers dyed their beards all the colors of the rainbow…didn’t he? He would also be wondering how Armstrong intended to grow a blue beard. Since Armstrong was wondering the same thing himself, he let it go there.

As soon as they got into the outskirts of Salt Lake City, the sniping started. Armstrong swore as he hit the dirt. This was supposed to be territory the USA controlled. Civilians here were supposed to be disarmed. With Utah under martial law, the penalty for keeping firearms was death. So was the penalty for harboring Mormon fighters. No one seemed to worry about that.

After a few minutes and a burst of machine-gun fire, the sniping stopped. The soldiers got to their feet again and tramped on. “Nice to be back at the same old stand, isn’t it?” Armstrong said.

“Lovely.” Yossel Reisen modified the word with a participle that brought a sour smile to Armstrong’s face.

The Mormons still held the military compound northeast of downtown Salt Lake City that the United States, with the tact that made the central government so beloved in Utah, called Fort Custer. Before becoming a national hero in the Second Mexican War, George Armstrong Custer hanged John Taylor-Brigham Young’s successor-and several other prominent Mormons on the grounds of that fort. Afterwards, Custer said his biggest regret was not hanging Abe Lincoln, too.

U.S. artillery and aircraft pounded the Mormon garrison up there. The Mormons replied with mortars and screaming meemies and whatever else they could get their hands on.

A lieutenant led the platoon Armstrong and his men were replacing. The officer showed no particular surprise at briefing a noncom. “A sergeant’s got the other platoon in this company, too,” he said. “Just dumb luck I haven’t stopped anything myself.” A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. He looked beat to hell. But for the gold bars on his shoulders, he might have been a noncom, too.

Because he’d been through the mill, Armstrong gave him more respect than he would have otherwise. “Hope you stay safe, sir,” he said. “They got anything special up ahead of us I ought to know about? Places where they like to put mortars? Sniper spots? Infiltration routes?”

“Ha! You’re no virgin, sure as hell,” the lieutenant said.

“Bet your ass,” Armstrong told him, and then, “Uh, yes, sir.”

“‘Bet your ass’ will do fine.” The lieutenant laughed. “Don’t slip and say it back of the line, that’s all, or it’ll be your ass.” He pointed out the trouble spots on the other side of the line, and the places where U.S. soldiers had to keep their heads down if they didn’t want to turn into sniper bait. And he added, “Brigham’s bastards have some kind of headquarters about half a mile ahead of us. That’s what I figure, anyhow. More foot traffic up there”-he pointed-carefully-to show where-“than anything else is likely to account for.”

“You put snipers on ’em?” Armstrong asked.

“Oh, hell, yes,” the lieutenant said. “They’re sneaky as snakes about it now, but the traffic won’t go away.”

“Maybe some mortars’ll shift ’em,” Armstrong said. “Maybe they’ll go away and be somebody else’s headache. Hell, that’d do.” The lieutenant laughed again, for all the world as if he were kidding.

After the other platoon pulled back, Armstrong put his own snipers into some likely looking spots. He told them to pick off the first few Mormons they spotted. One of the snipers said, “I got it, Sarge. You don’t want those shitheels figuring we’re a bunch of damn greenhorns.”

“Right the first time, Urban,” Armstrong answered. “As soon as they know we know what the hell we’re doing, they’ll find somebody easier to pick on. Hell, I would.”

One of the Mormons took a shot at him as he left that nest. The bullet cracked past his head. He flattened out and crawled for a while after that. Yes, the guys on the other side were seeing what they were up against.

They tried a trench raid that night. Having acquired a nastily suspicious mind in the course of almost two years of fighting, Armstrong was waiting for it. He sited a couple of machine guns to cover the route he thought the enemy most likely to take, and he guessed right. The Mormons retreated as fast as they could-from the cries that rose, some of them were wounded. His platoon didn’t lose a man.

They left him and his men severely alone for the next two days. That suited him fine, even if it did make him wonder what they were up to. He assumed they were up to something. They usually were.

On the third morning, a Mormon approached under flag of truce. Armstrong shouted for his men to stop shooting. One thing the Mormons didn’t do was violate a cease-fire. They were scrupulous about that kind of thing. They always played fair, even if they played hard.

Armstrong stared at the Mormon. “You!” he said.

“You!” the Mormon-a major-echoed. They’d met before. Armstrong had made him strip to his drawers to prove he wasn’t a people bomb. The Mormons did their best to pay him back by turning him into a casualty. They didn’t quite manage, but not for lack of effort. The officer went on, “You’d better let me through this time.”

“Oh, yeah?” That automatically made Armstrong suspicious. “How come?”

“Because-” The Mormon choked on his answer and had to try again: “Because I’m coming to try to work out a surrender, that’s why.” He looked like a man who badly, desperately, wanted to scream, God damn it! He didn’t, though. In all too many ways, the Mormons were made of stern stuff.

“Oh, yeah?” In spite of himself, Armstrong didn’t sound so hostile this time. The Mormon major’s fury and frustration embittered his face as well as his voice.

“Yeah.” Again, the Mormon’s fastidiousness seemed to handicap him. “If we don’t, you people will murder all of us, the same as the Confederates are murdering their colored people.”

“Why should you piss and moan about Featherston’s fuckers?” Armstrong said. “You’re in bed with ’em, for Christ’s sake!”

He got a look full of hatred from the Mormon major. “‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend,’” the Mormon quoted. “You ever hear that one? You people send guns to the Negroes. The Confederates give us a hand when they can. It evens out.”

“Oh, boy. It evens out,” Armstrong said in a hollow voice. “How do we know you guys won’t keep using people bombs even after you say you’ve given up?”

“Because we’ll be hostages, that’s how.” The Mormon major looked and sounded like death warmed over. “How many of us will you murder every time anything like that happens? You’ll set the number high-and you know it.”

“Like you won’t deserve it,” Armstrong said.

“I don’t have to dicker with you, and I thank God for that,” the Mormon said. “Will you please pass me through to your officers? They’re the ones who can say whether they’ll let any of us live.”

Armstrong thought about making him strip again. He didn’t do it this time. He wanted nothing more than getting out of Utah in one piece. A truce or a surrender or whatever you called it made that more likely. He did say, “Come forward so I can pat you down. You still may be a people bomb.”

“Do whatever you think you need to,” the Mormon said. By itself, that went a long way toward convincing Armstrong he wasn’t loaded with explosives. The man came up to him, lowered the white flag, and raised his hands. Armstrong frisked him and found the nothing he expected.

“Yeah, you’re clean,” Armstrong said when he was satisfied. “Come on with me. I’ll take you back.”

“You’re not gloating as much as I thought you would,” the Mormon major remarked.

“Sorry,” Armstrong said. “I just want to get this over with so we can go on with the real war, you know what I mean?”

“Oh, sure,” the enemy officer said bitterly. “We’re just the sideshow, along with the trained ponies and the flea circus and the freaks.”

“You said it, pal-I didn’t,” Armstrong replied. The Mormon gave him another dirty look. He ignored it.

He passed the Mormon major on to behind-the-line troops, then went back to his platoon. “You think anything will come of it?” Yossel asked him.

“Beats me,” Armstrong said. “Even if it does, are we ever gonna let up on these snakes again? Every time we try it, they give us one right in the nuts.”

“Be nice to get the hell out of Utah,” Yossel said wistfully.

“Yeah, and if they let us leave, you know where they’ll ship our asses next?” Armstrong waited for Yossel to shake his head, then went on, “Up to fucking Canada, that’s where. We’re good at putting down rebellions, so they’ll give us another one.” Yossel, a look of horror on his face, flipped him the bird. Armstrong gave it right back. He knew how the War Department’s mind worked-if you called that working.

Flora Blackford and Robert Taft glared at each other in the small conference room. The Congresswoman from New York and the Senator from Ohio were friends on a personal level. Though she was a Socialist and he a conservative Democrat, their views on prosecuting the war hadn’t been very different. They hadn’t been, but they were now.

“We have Jake Featherston to deal with,” Flora said. “He’s more important. We can worry about the Mormons later.”

“We’ve got them on the ropes now. We ought to finish them off,” Taft said. “Then we won’t have to worry about them later.”

“How do you aim to finish them?” Flora inquired. “If you don’t make peace when they ask for it, don’t you have to kill them all?”

Taft gestured toward the front of Congressional Hall. Along with Confederate bombs from the air, it was also scarred by Mormon auto bombs and people bombs. “Aren’t they doing their best to kill us all, or as many of us as they can?” he said.

“But they can’t, and we can,” she said. “They’re only trouble to us. We can destroy them. Isn’t that reason enough not to?”

“How many bites do they get?” Robert Taft returned. “Whenever we get in trouble with the Confederate States, the Mormons try to take advantage of it. They did it in the Second Mexican War. They did it in the Great War. If they just stayed quiet in Utah this time around and enjoyed being citizens again, nobody would have bothered them at all.”

“‘Enjoyed being citizens again,’” Flora echoed. “Do you think they might resent us a little for occupying them for twenty years?”

“Maybe,” Taft answered calmly. “Do you think we might resent them a little bit for making us conquer the whole state of Utah house by house in the Great War? How many casualties did they cause? How many divisions did they tie down? And now they’re doing it again. Do you think they can just walk away and say, ‘All right, we’ve had enough,’ and get off easy? Your nephew’s there, isn’t he? What does he say about that?”

“Yossel says he’d sooner fight the Confederates. That’s the war that really counts,” Flora answered. He also said he worried about getting sent to Canada instead. She understood that. If a division showed it could put down one rebellion, wouldn’t the War Department figure it was good at the job and ship it off to help put down another one?

“Even if the Mormons do surrender, or claim they’re surrendering, how many troops will we have to leave behind in Utah to disarm them all and make sure they don’t start fighting again as soon as our backs are turned?” Robert Taft asked. “Just licking them isn’t the only problem. We have to remind them that they’re licked, and that they’ll catch it even worse if they give us any more trouble. Even now, they’re probably stashing guns and explosives as fast as they can.”

They probably were, too. She couldn’t tell him he was wrong. But she said, “If we say, ‘No, you can’t surrender,’ what will they do? Fight till they’re all dead. Send people bombs all over the country, and auto bombs, and poison gas if they can arrange that. They’ll play Samson in the temple, except they won’t be playing.”

Now Taft gave her an unhappy look, because that also seemed only too probable. “You’re saying we don’t win even if we win, and they don’t lose even if they lose.”

“Oh, they lose, all right,” Flora said. “But so do we.”

“Maybe we ought to kill them all in that case,” Taft said.

Now Flora violently shook her head. “No, Robert. I’m going to quote the New Testament at you, even if I am Jewish: ‘For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his soul?’ You’ve seen the photos of those Confederate camp guards grinning while they hold their rifles and stand there on trenches full of dead Negroes. Do you want pictures like that with our soldiers in them?”

She waited. If Taft said yes, their cautious friendship was just one more war casualty. But he shook his head, too. “No. Those photographs sicken me-almost as much for what massacres like that do to the guards as for what they do to the poor colored people. I don’t want to murder the Mormons like that. But if they die in battle I won’t shed many tears.”

“The question is, can we make real U.S. citizens out of the Mormons?” Flora said.

“We’ve been trying since before the War of Secession, and we haven’t had much luck,” Taft said.

Almost two thousand years earlier, hadn’t Roman senators and imperial officials in Palestine asked the same kind of questions about the Jews there? They didn’t come up with any good answers. Discrimination and maltreatment sparked one Jewish revolt after another. The revolts sparked mass slaughter, plus more discrimination and maltreatment. Finally, the Romans ended up throwing most of the surviving Jews out of Palestine altogether.

Flora’s head came up. “I wonder if that would work here,” she murmured.

“If what would work here?” Robert Taft asked.

“Expelling the Mormons from Utah after they surrender,” Flora answered.

“Where would you put them if you did that?”

“Some place where they wouldn’t make so much trouble.” Flora explained what she’d been thinking about her own people’s past.

“Are they tied to Salt Lake City the way the Jews were to Jerusalem in days gone by?” Taft asked. “I have to tell you, I don’t know the answer to that. Does anyone? Somebody would probably be able to tell us. But where would you put them? In Houston, now that we have some of it back? Wouldn’t they join the Confederates against us? Would you send them up to Canada? Wouldn’t they just stir up the Canucks? Aren’t the Canucks stirred up enough already? Newfoundland? Wouldn’t they start waving across the Atlantic to the British?”

Those were all good questions. Disagree with him or not, you judged Robert Taft a fool at your peril. Flora said, “Maybe we could ship them to the Sandwich Islands. It looks like we’ll be able to hold on to those now.”

“Wouldn’t the Mormons yell for the Japanese?” Taft snorted laughter. “And wouldn’t they deserve each other?”

“Maybe we could keep them off the island with Honolulu and Pearl Harbor on it,” Flora said. “The others don’t matter so much to the military. What I’m thinking is that, if we get them out of Utah, we can search what they take with them. They wouldn’t have years and years’ worth of guns and ammunition and explosives squirreled away and hidden so well we couldn’t find them.”

“They wouldn’t when they left, no,” Taft agreed. “How long would they need to start getting hold of them, though?”

“Twenty minutes-maybe half an hour if we take them all the way out to the Sandwich Islands,” Flora said. “I know that, Robert. But we have to do something with those people, and I don’t want to kill them all. I don’t want to leave them in place, either. That’s just asking for the whole thing to start all over again in another generation.”

“It won’t if we keep an eye on them.” Robert Taft sighed and ran a hand over the bald crown of his head. He was a much slimmer man than his father, but William Howard Taft had kept his hair till his dying day. With another sigh, the Senator from Ohio went on, “I don’t suppose it’s in the range of human nature to hold somebody down for much longer than a generation, is it? We couldn’t even do it to the Confederates after the Great War.”

“Will we after this one?” Flora asked. “If we don’t, what will they eventually do to us because we didn’t?”

“Whatever they can, probably. We put off the evil day as long as we’re able to, that’s all,” Taft said.

“I suppose so.” Flora also supposed she sounded uneasy. If Taft knew about the U.S. project out in western Washington, he’d never given any sign of it. Flora didn’t want to talk about the possibility of splitting atoms, or about the possibility of one bomb’s being able to destroy a whole city. The Confederate States weren’t so big a country as the United States. But they were plenty big enough to conceal a project like that.

If the Confederacy lost the war, that kind of project would also fall to pieces…wouldn’t it? It would take lots of money and lots of equipment a beaten CSA wouldn’t be able to afford or to hide. But the fastest way to go from a beaten country to one ready to stand on its own two feet again was to make a bomb like that.

“The Mormons.” She got back to the issue at hand. “If we’re not going to slaughter them all, we’ve got to accept their surrender. I don’t see any other choice. Do you, really?”

“No-o-o.” Taft sounded most reluctant to accept his own conclusion, for which Flora could hardly blame him. “But what can we do with them once we do?”

“Sit on them in Utah or sit on them somewhere else,” Flora said. “Those are the only two things we can do. Which would you rather?”

“If we drive them out, we bring gentiles into Utah to take their place,” Taft said. “That won’t be easy or cheap, either.”

“Robert, from now on nothing this government does will be easy or cheap,” Flora said. Taft pursed his lips as if biting down on an unripe persimmon. Democrats hated letting the government spend money, except on guns. But he didn’t contradict her. She went on, “We have to worry about whether we do the right thing. Finding it won’t always be easy, but we have to try.”

“Right now, nothing comes ahead of beating Jake Featherston,” Taft said. “Nothing.”

“Well, I don’t think you’ll find many people in the USA to tell you you’re wrong,” Flora said. “I sure won’t. He’s a danger to us and he’s a danger to his own country.” And if he gets one of those uranium bombs, he’s a danger to the whole world. Again, she swallowed that worry. “I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but you were right and Al Smith was wrong in 1940. We never should have allowed the plebiscites that gave Kentucky and Houston back to the CSA. Featherston uses the empty space in west Texas as a shield against us, and he used Kentucky as a springboard to attack us.”

“He said he was going to,” Taft said. “He told us what he had in mind, and we didn’t listen to him. It almost makes you think we deserve what’s happened since. Aren’t we paying for our own stupidity?”

“We’re paying for our own decency,” Flora answered. “It’s not quite the same thing, or I hope it’s not. And that brings us back to the Mormons, I’m afraid. Can we be right and decent at the same time?”

“If we don’t wipe them off the face of the earth, if we do accept their surrender, how do we make sure we don’t give them a chance to pay us back for letting them live?” Taft asked. “That’s what it comes down to.”

“Occupy the land they still hold. Disarm them as thoroughly as we can. Maybe ship them out of Utah; I don’t know. Hostages for good behavior, I suppose.” Flora grimaced. She didn’t like that. But she could see that it had a better chance of controlling the Mormons than a lot of other things did. Taft nodded at each suggestion. Then she said, “Freedom of worship as long as they render unto Caesar.” She laughed; she’d quoted the New Testament twice in the space of a few minutes.

“They’ll use it as an excuse to take lots of wives. They’ll use it as an excuse to get together and plot against us, too,” Taft said.

“We have to give them a carrot along with the stick,” Flora said. “Otherwise, they’ll just keep fighting. Wouldn’t you, if you didn’t get anything by quitting? And do you know what else? As long as all their marriages after the first one are unofficial, I’m sick of flabbling about them. Life is too short.”

Taft grumbled discontentedly. He was a straitlaced man. But when they discussed the surrender offer in the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, he didn’t oppose her when she made the same proposal. She hoped that was a good sign.

From Pittsburgh to Cincinnati. In one way, Dr. Leonard O’Doull thought that was progress. When he’d labored in the hospital on the University of Pittsburgh campus, the Confederates still had a chance to break through, to run wild in the second year of the war as they did in the first.

That didn’t-quite-happen. Now, after a hard winter and a rugged spring, the enemy was gone from U.S. soil east of the Mississippi. This summer, the United States would have the chance to show what they could do.

Granville McDougald summed up O’Doull’s worries in one pithy sentence: “How are we going to fuck it up this time?”

Even more than To be or not to be?, that was the question. The U.S. push toward Richmond had shown a lot of the ways not to fight a war. Daniel MacArthur seemed to do his best to acquaint the War Department with every single one of them. He hadn’t come west to lead whatever the United States would do out here. That struck O’Doull as at least mildly encouraging.

But when he looked around at what was left of Cincinnati, when he thought about all the devastation between Pittsburgh and here, he came close to despairing. His church taught that despair was the one unforgivable sin, and he understood why, but it was hard to avoid anyway. “Have we got enough left to do what we need to do?” he asked.

“Have the Confederates got enough left to stop us?” McDougald returned.

That was the other side of the coin, all right. Plainly, the Confederates had put everything they had into the invasion of Ohio and Pennsylvania. “They aren’t running up the white flag,” O’Doull said. The ruins of Cincinnati proved that, too. After sullenly pulling back across the Ohio-and after rescuing most of the force they had north of the river-Featherston’s men started methodically shelling the Ohio city from emplacements in Kentucky. Their attitude seemed to be that if the United States wanted to use Cincinnati as a base from which to invade C.S. territory, they were welcome to try.

Most of the casualties U.S. doctors were treating came from artillery rounds. Bombs caused the rest; Confederate airplanes didn’t come over every night, but they came whenever they could. U.S. bombers also did their best to smash up targets on the far side of the river.

“When do you think the balloon will go up?” McDougald asked. The hospital where they worked was painted white and had big Red Crosses on the walls and roof. O’Doull didn’t think the Confederates shelled and bombed it on purpose. That didn’t mean it didn’t get hit every now and again. C.S. bombs and shells didn’t have eyes; they couldn’t see exactly where they were going.

O’Doull remembered other offensives in days and years gone by. “When we’ve gathered everything together so there’s no possible doubt about where we’re going or what we’re doing,” he answered. “When we’ve given the Confederates all the time they need to get ready to knock us for a loop.”

McDougald raised an eyebrow toward the bald crown of his head. “You’re in a cheerful mood today, aren’t you, Doc?”

“Well, hell, Granny, you asked,” O’Doull said. “Tell me that’s not how we usually do things.”

“Can’t,” Granville McDougald admitted. “Wish to God I could, but I damn well can’t. Besides, it looks like we’re filling Cincinnati up with everything under the sun so we can pop the Confederates in the nose.”

“Doesn’t it just?” O’Doull said. “And don’t you suppose they’ve got a suspicion that we might want to cross the river here? Wouldn’t you?”

“Not me. I’ve given up having suspicions. They end up getting confirmed, and then I’m unhappy,” the medic said. “I don’t like being unhappy. It makes me sad when I am.”

“Er-right,” O’Doull said. McDougald smiled back, calm as a cynical Buddha.

Before either one of them could go any further with it, they got called into an operating room. They had no room for a difference of opinion there. What needed doing was only too obvious: nothing any surgeon in the world could do would save an arm mangled like that one.

“Want to do the honors, Granny?” O’Doull said. “I’ll pass gas for you if you care to.”

“Sure, if you don’t mind,” McDougald answered. “A straight amputation I can manage, and he’ll get the same result from me as he would from you. It’s the complicated stuff where you’ve got an edge on me.”

To some degree, that was true. The degree was less than McDougald made it out to be. Scrupulously polite, the medic didn’t pretend to have an M.D.’s skills. But he did have close to thirty years of experience at repairing wounded men. Plenty of doctors knew less than he did, and were more arrogant about what they did know.

O’Doull knew he was an amateur anesthetist himself. He’d knocked out patients back in Quebec before operating on them. He’d done it in the field, too, but he wasn’t all that confident in his own skills.

Here, though, everything was straightforward. As soon as the man went out, McDougald got to work with scalpel and bone saw, taking the mangled arm off above the elbow. He tied off bleeders one after another, closed the dreadful wound, and sighed. “Whatever that poor guy was, he won’t be when he wakes up.”

“Maybe he was left-handed,” O’Doull said.

“Mm-maybe.” McDougald was a lefty himself. “Odds are long, though. And even if a one-armed man has his good arm, he’s still got a hard road in front of him.”

“Better than dying,” O’Doull said.

“I suppose you’re right. I never once heard a dead man say he’d rather be the way he was than short an arm,” McDougald said.

“You never…” O’Doull’s voice trailed away as he worked through the possibilities in that. “How many dead people do you usually talk with?”

“Oh, not that many,” Granville McDougald said. “Harder than anything getting a straight answer out of ’em.”

“I believe you,” O’Doull said. “Have you noticed it’s pretty damn hard getting a straight answer out of you, too?”

“Out of me? Nah.” McDougald shook his head. “I’m as transparent as glass. The only problem with that is, too many of our people are as breakable as glass, which isn’t so good.”

He could spin out nonsense, or sometimes stuff that seemed like nonsense but wasn’t, faster than O’Doull could pin him down on it. O’Doull mostly didn’t try; only the sheer outrageousness of the medic’s latest effort pulled a protest out of him.

Before he could do any more squawking, an officer who pretty plainly wasn’t a doctor came into the O.R. “Major O’Doull?” the stranger asked. When O’Doull admitted he was himself, the newcomer said, “I’m Vic Hodding. I’m a captain in Intelligence.”

Granny McDougald let out a soft snort. Above Hodding’s surgical mask, his cat-green eyes swung toward the medic. McDougald blandly stared back. Nobody could prove a thing, even if the editorial message came through loud and clear. “Well, Captain, what can I do for you?” O’Doull asked, wondering if he really wanted to know.

“We’ve got a wounded man we brought back from the other side of the Ohio,” Hodding replied. “He knows some things we really need to find out. What are the drugs that would help pull them out of him?”

“Rack and thumbscrews often work wonders,” McDougald said, hardly bothering to hide his scorn.

Hodding glanced toward him again. “Who is this man?” he inquired of O’Doull with a certain dangerous formality.

“Never mind,” O’Doull answered. “If you need help from me, you don’t need to know. And if you don’t need help from me, I’ll be damned if I tell you. And I’ll do everything I know how to do to stop you from making trouble for him.”

Captain Hodding took that more calmly than O’Doull expected-more calmly than he would have himself, he thought. “He must be good at what he does,” the Intelligence officer remarked. O’Doull said nothing. Hodding went on, “Anyway, we need answers from this guy. Strongarm stuff may just get us lies-and besides, we don’t like to do it, no matter what Mr. High And Mighty there says. What goes around comes around, and the Confederates are too likely to pay us back if we get rough.”

O’Doull could see what Granny McDougald was thinking. So then they pay us back with needles instead. Oh, boy. But needles were less likely to wreck a man for life than some of the other things interrogators did.

“What do you think this guy knows?” O’Doull asked. Vic Hodding stood mute. O’Doull made an impatient noise. “Look, I’m going to be there while you’re questioning him, right? So what the hell are you flabbling about? You don’t want me there, go find some other guy to do this for you.”

After some thought and an apparent wrestle with himself, Hodding nodded. “Yeah, you’re right, Doc. You have need-to-know.” The way he brought out the phrase would have told O’Doull he was in Intelligence even without any other evidence. He continued, “We infiltrated some people down south of the river and extracted this guy. What he doesn’t know about their trains and trucks in Kentucky and Tennessee isn’t worth knowing. We should have got him out clean, but he put up more of a fight than we figured.” He shrugged. “These things happen.”

“In films, the guy always has the secret for the new poison gas,” O’Doull said.

“Yeah, and the blonde with the big boobs teases it out of him, and he loves every minute of it,” Hodding said. “Doctors in films never treat ringworm, either. But if the Confederates have trouble moving supplies, that makes our life a hell of a lot easier.”

He wasn’t wrong. Granville McDougald murmured, “Pentothal?”

O’Doull nodded. “Best chance I’ve got.” He turned to the Intelligence officer. “Sodium pentothal may make him not care so much about what he says. Or it may not. Drugging a guy and making him spill his guts is another one of those things that work better in films.”

“All right. Do what you can,” Hodding said. “He’s likelier to blab with the stuff in him than without it, right?” O’Doull nodded again-that was true, and didn’t commit him to anything. Captain Hodding gestured toward the door. “Come on, then.”

The Confederate officer was wounded in the leg and shoulder. He glared at O’Doull. “I am Travis W.W. Oliphant, colonel, C.S. Army.” He gave his pay number.

“Pleased to meet you, Colonel. I’m Major O’Doull. I’m a doctor, and I’m going to give you something to make you feel a little better,” O’Doull said. Colonel Oliphant looked suspicious, but he didn’t try to fight as O’Doull injected him.

After a little while, the Confederate said, “I do feel easier.” Pentothal sneaked up on you. It didn’t make your troubles go away, but it did mean you weren’t likely to remember them once you came out from under it.

Captain Hodding started questioning Oliphant. The logistics specialist didn’t seem to worry about what he said. A lot that came out was drivel, but enough wasn’t to keep Hodding scribbling notes. O’Doull gave the colonel more pentothal. Too much and he’d stop making sense altogether. Not enough and he’d clam up. O’Doull found what seemed the right dosage by experiment.

“Thanks, Major,” Hodding said when Colonel Oliphant ran dry. “I think you helped.”

“Well, good,” O’Doull answered, and wondered if it was. Would he want to look in a mirror the next time he passed one?

Instead of going off to the peaceful, even bucolic campus of Washington University, Clarence Potter summoned Professor Henderson V. FitzBelmont to Richmond. Potter wanted the nuclear physicist to see what the war was doing to the capital of the CSA. Maybe then FitzBelmont wouldn’t think of his experiments as abstractions that could move along at their own pace. Maybe.

If some Florida cinema studio needed a professor out of central casting, it could do much worse than Henderson FitzBelmont. He was tweedy. He was bespectacled. Clarence Potter wore eyeglasses, too, and had since he was a young man. But he didn’t look perpetually surprised at the world around him the way Professor FitzBelmont did.

He met the physicist in Capitol Square, across Ninth Street from the War Department. The bench on which he waited was the one where he and Nathan Bedford Forrest III hadn’t quite plotted against Jake Featherston. It gave a fine view of the bombed-out ruins of the Capitol, of the craters whose dirt sported new grass and even flowers as spring advanced, and of the sandbagged statues of George Washington and Albert Sidney Johnston. If you looked around, you could see more of what almost two years of Yankee air raids had done to Richmond.

Professor FitzBelmont came into Capitol Square at two o’clock, just when Potter asked him to. Potter stood up and waved. He kept waving till FitzBelmont spotted him. A look of relief on his face, the professor waved back and picked his way over the battered ground to the bench.

“Hello, uh, General,” FitzBelmont said, sticking out a hand.

“Professor.” Potter shook hands. Henderson FitzBelmont did have a respectable grip. Potter gestured to the bench. “Have a seat. We’ve got some things to talk about.”

“All right.” Professor FitzBelmont looked around. “I must say I’ve seen views that inspired me more.”

“You surprise me,” Potter said.

“I do? Why?” the physicist said. “It’s dreary, it’s battered, it’s sad-I can’t think of one good thing to say about it.”

“That’s why it ought to inspire you,” Potter said. Behind the lenses of his spectacles, Henderson V. FitzBelmont blinked. Potter went on, “It shows you that your country’s in trouble. If any one man can get us out of trouble, you’re him. If we have uranium bombs, we win. It’s that simple.”

“Mr. Potter-” FitzBelmont began.

“General Potter, please,” Potter broke in. He saw the faint scorn the other man didn’t have the sense to hide. Nettled, he did his best to explain: “It means as much to me as Professor does to you, and I had to go through a lot to earn it-not the same kinds of things you did, but a lot.”

Henderson FitzBelmont weighed that. He evidently didn’t find it wanting, for he nodded. “I’m sorry, General Potter. I’ll remember from now on. You must understand, we are doing everything we know how to do to make a uranium bomb. One of the things we’re finding out, unfortunately, is how much we don’t know how to do. When you go through unexplored territory, that happens. I wish it didn’t, but it does.”

He was calm, sensible, rational. Clarence Potter had no doubt that made him a splendid scientist. It didn’t help a country at war, a country fighting for its life, a country whose fight for its life wasn’t going any too well. “How do we go faster?” Potter asked. “Whatever you need, you’ll get. President Featherston has made that very clear.”

“Yes, I certainly can’t complain about the support I’m getting, especially after the…sad events in Pittsburgh,” FitzBelmont said-maybe he did own something resembling discretion after all. But then he went on, “What this project needs most of all is time. If you can give me back all the months when the President believed it a foolish waste of money and effort, we will be better off; I guarantee you that.”

So there, Potter thought. “You’re the physicist,” he said. “If you can undo that…Hell, if you can do that, forget about the uranium bomb.”

“Time travel is for the pulp magazines, I’m afraid,” FitzBelmont said. “No evidence that it’s possible, and plenty that it isn’t. The bomb, on the other hand, is definitely possible-and definitely difficult, too.”

“I remember your saying before that working with uranium hexafluoride was giving you fits,” Potter said. “Are you doing better with that now?”

“Somewhat,” FitzBelmont answered. The physicist didn’t blink when Potter got hexafluoride out without stumbling. He chose to take that as a mild compliment. Henderson FitzBelmont continued, “We’ve come up with some new chemicals-fluorocarbons, we’re calling them-that the uranium hexafluoride doesn’t attack. Nothing else seems to, either. They’ll have all kinds of peacetime uses-I’m sure of it. For now, though, they give us much better control over the UF₆.”

UF ₆ ? Potter wondered. Then he realized it was another way to say uranium hexafluoride. If he weren’t used to hearing CO₂ for carbon dioxide, he would have been baffled. “All right,” he said after a pause he hoped FitzBelmont didn’t notice. “So you’ve got better control over it. What does that mean?”

“It puts fewer people in the hospital. It doesn’t eat through so much lab apparatus. Those are good starting points,” FitzBelmont said, and Potter could hardly tell him he was wrong. “Now we actually have a chance to separate the UF₆ with the U-235 from the UF₆ with the U-238.”

“You haven’t done that yet?” Potter said in dismay.

“It’s not easy. The two isotopes are chemically identical,” FitzBelmont reminded him. “We can’t add, say, bicarbonate of soda and have it do something with one and not with the other. It won’t work. The difference in weight between the two molecules is just under one percent. That’s what we’ve got to take advantage of-if we can.”

“And?” Potter said.

“So far, we seem to be having the most luck with centrifuges,” Henderson FitzBelmont said. “The degree of enrichment each treatment gives is small, but it’s real. And the centrifuges we’re using now are a lot stronger than the ones we had when we started. They need to be-the old ones aren’t worth much, not for this kind of research.”

“And when you treat the slightly enriched, uh, UF₆, you get slightly more enriched UF₆? Is that right?” Potter asked.

“It’s exactly right!” By the way FitzBelmont beamed, he’d just got an A on his midterm. “After enough steps, we do expect to achieve some very significant enrichment.”

“How far away from a bomb are you?” Potter asked bluntly.

“Well, I won’t know till we get closer,” Professor FitzBelmont said. Potter made an impatient noise. Hastily, the physicist continued, “If I had to guess, I’d say we’re two years away, assuming everything goes perfectly. Since it won’t-it never does-two and a half years, maybe three, seems a better guess.”

“So we wouldn’t have this till…late 1945, maybe 1946?” Potter shook his head. “We need it sooner than that, Professor. We need it a hell of a lot sooner than that.” All those months Jake Featherston wasted were coming back to haunt the CSA. The damnyankees sure didn’t waste any time when they realized a uranium bomb was possible. Which raised another question…“How soon will the United States get one of these things?”

“You’d do better asking someone in Philadelphia,” FitzBelmont said. Clarence Potter made another wordless noise, this one full of frustration. He was doing his best to spy on the U.S. uranium-bomb project, without much luck. Yankee authorities were holding their cards so close to their chest, they were almost inside their ribs. FitzBelmont added, “You can do something about when the United States get theirs, you know.”

“How’s that again?” Full of his own gloom, Potter listened to FitzBelmont with half an ear. Jake Featherston was going to come down on him like a thousand-pound bomb. Featherston wouldn’t blame himself for stalling the Confederate project. He never blamed himself for anything. But the Confederacy couldn’t afford the late start. The United States had more scientists and more resources. They had enough left over that they could afford mistakes. Everything had to go right to give the CSA a decent chance to win. For a while, it had. For a while…

“You can delay the U.S. bomb, General,” Henderson V. FitzBelmont said. “If you damage or destroy the facility where the Yankees are working on it, you’ll make them deal with what you’ve done instead of going forward on their own work.”

He wasn’t wrong. He wasn’t even slightly wrong. “Son of a bitch,” Potter muttered. The U.S. project was hard for the CSA to reach-way the hell out there in Washington State. Where there’s a will, there’s a lawyer, he thought bemusedly. The Confederates could figure out how to attack it if they needed to badly enough. The way things looked now, they did.

Potter shook his head. He’d seen the race to the uranium bomb as just that: a race. If the United States started out ahead and ran faster anyhow, what would happen? They’d get to the finish line first. And when they did, Richmond would go up in heat like the center of the sun, and that would be the end of that.

But it wasn’t just a race. It was a war. In a race, you’d get disqualified if you tripped the other guy and threw sand in his eyes. In a war, you might buy yourself the time you needed to catch up and go ahead.

This time, Clarence Potter grabbed FitzBelmont’s hand and pumped it up and down. “Professor, I’m damn glad I called you into Richmond,” he said. “Damn glad!”

“Good,” the physicist said. “As for me, I look forward to returning to my work. As long as I’m here, can I ask you send me, oh, five skilled workers? We’re desperately short of them, and it seems next to impossible to pry the kind of people we need out of war plants.”

“You’ll have ’em, by God,” Potter promised. “Can you tell me who told you no? Whoever it is, he’ll be sorry he was ever born.” Grim anticipation filled his voice.

FitzBelmont reached into the inside pocket of his herringbone jacket. “I have a list right here… No, this is a list of some of the things my wife wants me to shop for while I’m in Richmond.” He frowned, then reached into the other inside pocket. “Ah, here we are.” He handed Potter the list he needed.

“I’ll take care of these folks, Professor. They’ll find out what priority means. You can count on that.” Potter carefully put the list in his wallet. He even more carefully refrained from mentioning, or so much as thinking about, how well FitzBelmont played the role of an absentminded professor.

“Thank you, General. Are we finished?” FitzBelmont asked. When Potter nodded, the physicist got to his feet. He looked around at Capitol Square, sighed, and shook his head. He started off, then stopped and looked back. “Uh, freedom!”

“Freedom!” Potter hated the slogan, but that didn’t matter. In Jake Featherston’s CSA, not responding was inconceivable.

Henderson V. FitzBelmont walked north, toward Ford’s Hotel. Under one name or another, the hotel had stood across the street from Capitol Square since before the War of Secession. Watching the physicist go, Clarence Potter sighed. Anne Colleton always stayed at Ford’s when she came up to Richmond. Potter had stayed there himself, too, but his thoughts were on the South Carolina woman he’d…loved?

He nodded. No other word for it, even if it was a cross-grained, jagged kind of love, and one much marred by politics. She’d backed Jake Featherston when the Freedom Party was only a little cloud on the horizon. Potter laughed. He’d never leaned that way himself. He still didn’t, come to that.

But now Anne was dead, killed in a Yankee air raid on Charleston. One of her brothers got gassed by the Yankees in the Great War, and was murdered at the start of the Red Negro uprising. The other went into Pittsburgh. Tom Colleton wasn’t listed as a POW, so he was probably dead. A whole family destroyed by the USA.

“We need that bomb,” Potter murmured. “Jesus, do we ever.”

“Wow!” George Enos said as the Townsend approached San Diego harbor. “The mainland! I wondered if I’d ever see it again.”

“I’ll kiss the pier when we get off the ship,” Fremont Dalby said. The gun chief added, “Too goddamn many times when I didn’t just wonder if I’d see it again-I was fucking sure I wouldn’t.”

He’d been in the Navy since…Well, not quite since steam replaced sail, but one hell of a long time. He could say something like that without worrying that people might think he was yellow. George couldn’t, which didn’t mean the same thought hadn’t gone through his mind.

Dalby nudged him. “You can hop a train, go on back to Boston, see the wife and kiddies. All you need is a couple-three weeks of liberty, right?” He laughed and laughed.

“Funny,” George said. “Funny like a broken leg.” Nobody was going to get liberty like that. The brass might dole out twenty-four- and forty-eight-hour passes, enough to let sailors from the destroyer sample San Diego’s bars and brothels and tattoo parlors and other dockside attractions. George had never been here in his life, but he was sure they’d be the same as the dives in Boston and Honolulu. Sailors were the same here, weren’t they? As long as they were, the attractions would be, too.

“Hey, nobody’s shooting at us for a little bit,” Fritz Gustafson said. “I’ll take that.” From the loader, it was quite a speech.

“For a while, yeah,” Dalby agreed. “Wonder where we’ll go after they fuel us and get us more ammo and all that good shit? Probably down south against the Mexicans and the Confederates, I guess.”

That sounded like nasty, unpleasant, dangerous work to George. He’d seen enough nasty, unpleasant, dangerous work already. “Maybe they’ll send us up off the Canadian coast, so we can keep the Japs from running guns to the Canucks.”

“Dream on,” Dalby said. “Fuck, if they send us up there, they’ll probably send us to whatever the hell the name of that other place is-you know, with the Russians.”

“Alaska,” Gustafson said.

The CPO nodded. “There you go. That’s it. Nothing but emperors for us. We’ve been messing with the Mikado’s boys for too long. Now we can tangle with the Tsar. And the seas up there are worse than the North Atlantic.”

George started to say that was impossible. He knew the North Atlantic well, and knew how bad it could get. But he’d also rounded Cape Horn. That was worse. Maybe the Pacific was godawful up in the polar-bear country, too.

“Russians hardly give a damn about Alaska anyway,” Fritz Gustafson said.

“Well, Jesus, would you?” Dalby said. “It’s more Siberia. They’ve got enough Siberia already. If somebody ever found gold in it or something, you’d have to remember it was there. Till then? Shit, who cares?”

San Diego wasn’t Honolulu. The weather wasn’t quite perfect. It got cooler at night than it did in the Sandwich Islands. It was just very good. To somebody who’d grown up in Boston, that would do fine.

George sent a telegram to Connie, letting her and the boys know he was all right. The clerk at the Western Union office said, “It may take a while to get there, sir. We still don’t have as many lines as we’d like to carry east-west traffic.” The man, who was more than old enough to be George’s father, held up a hand when he saw him start to get mad. “Don’t blame me, sir. I don’t have anything to do with it. I’m just telling you how things are. You got to blame somebody, go and blame Jake Featherston.”

Everybody in the USA had good cause to blame Jake Featherston for something or other. A telegram delayed was small change. Ohio’s being torn to pieces badly enough to delay the telegram was rather larger. George didn’t dwell on Ohio. The telegram ticked him off. Like politics, grievances were personal.

Sure enough, he got a twenty-four-hour liberty. He wished it were forty-eight, but anything was better than nothing. With the rest of the 40mm gun crew, he drank and roistered and got his ashes hauled. He felt bad about that afterwards-what was he doing going to bed with a whore with saggy tits right after sending his wife a wire? He felt bad afterwards, but it felt great while it was happening…and that was what he was doing lying down with the chippy.

He also got a tattoo on his left biceps-a big anchor. That didn’t feel good while it was happening, even though he was drunk. But Fritz Gustafson was getting a naked woman on his right biceps, so George sat still for it. He wasn’t about to flinch in front of his buddy. Only later did he wonder if Fritz took the pricking in silence because he was there getting tattooed, too.

His arm felt worse the next morning. He wasn’t drunk then; he was hungover. All of him felt worse, but his arm especially. “It’ll get easier in a day or two,” Fremont Dalby said. That was rough sympathy, not hardheartedness: Dalby had ornaments on both arms and a small tiger on his right buttock.

He turned out to know what he was talking about. By the time the Townsend sailed a week later, George almost forgot about the tattoo except when he looked down and saw the blue marks under his skin. He also liked Gustafson’s ornament, but Connie would clout him if he came home with a floozy on his arm. Fritz was a bachelor, and could get away with stuff like that.

The Townsend sailed south, toward the not very distant border with the Empire of Mexico. She was part of a flotilla that included three more destroyers, two light cruisers, a heavy cruiser, and two escort carriers. The baby flattops were just like the ones that helped make sure the Japs wouldn’t take the Sandwich Islands away from the USA. They were built on freighter hulls, and had a freighter’s engines inside. Going flat out, they could make eighteen knots. But each one carried thirty airplanes. That gave them ten or twenty times the reach of even the heavy cruiser’s guns.

Although the flotilla stood well out to sea, it wasn’t very long before Y-ranging gear picked up a couple of airplanes outbound from Baja California to look things over. “Goddamn Mexicans,” Dalby said as George ran up to the antiaircraft gun.

“What did you expect, a big kiss?” George asked.

Dalby told him what Francisco Jose could kiss, and why. The CPO might have embroidered on that theme for quite a while, but Fritz Gustafson said, “Next to what the Japs threw at us, this is all chickenshit. Take an even strain.”

Fighters roared east off the flight decks of the Monitor and the Bonhomme Richard. They came back in less than half an hour. A couple of them waggled their wings as they flew over the carriers’ escorts. No Mexican airplanes appeared over the flotilla.

“Score one-I mean two-for the good guys,” George said.

“Yeah.” Fremont Dalby nodded. “But now the greasers will start screaming to the Confederates. Gotta figure we’re in business to yank Jake Featherston’s tail feathers, anyway. So pretty soon we’ll be playing against the first team.”

“Confederates don’t have any carriers in Guaymas,” George said.

“No, but they’ve got land-based air, and they’ve got subs, and who knows what all shit they do have in the Gulf of California?” Dalby said. “I guess that’s what we’re doing-finding out what kind of shit they’ve got there.”

“Such a thing as finding out the hard way,” George said.

When the flotilla got near the southern end of Baja California, bombers and fighter escorts left the escort carriers’ decks to pummel the Mexican installations at Cabo San Lucas. Scuttlebutt said the installations weren’t just Mexican but also Confederate. George wouldn’t have been surprised. Cabo San Lucas warded the Gulf of California, which led to Confederate Sonora. And the place was isolated enough-which was putting it mildly-to keep word of Confederate soldiers doing Mexicans’ jobs from spreading too far or too fast.

Cabo San Lucas lay at about the same latitude as Honolulu. Even lying well offshore, the Townsend got much hotter weather than she did in the Sandwich Islands. George wondered why. Maybe the North American continent screwed up the winds or something. That was all he could think of.

Then he stopped worrying about the weather. “Now hear this! Now hear this!” the loudspeakers blared. “We have two damaged aircraft returning from the raid on the Mexicans. They will come as far as they can before ditching, and we are going to go out after them. We don’t want to strand anybody if we can help it.”

“Roger that!” George exclaimed. He imagined floating in a life raft, or maybe just in a life jacket, praying somebody would pluck him out of the Pacific before the sharks or the glaring sun did him in. He shuddered. It was worse than going into the drink after your ship sank, because you’d be all alone out there.

The Townsend, two other destroyers, and a light cruiser peeled off and raced toward the Mexican coast. Up there in the sky, the pilots would be nursing everything they could from their shot-up airplanes. Every mile west they made bumped up their chances of getting rescued.

A swarm of intact aircraft flew over the ships. They were heading home to the carriers. Their pilots had to be thanking God they could get home. Then George spotted a dive bomber low in the sky and trailing smoke. Even as he watched, the airplane went into the Pacific. The pilot put it down as well as anybody could hope to. It skidded across the surface-it didn’t nose in.

Did he ditch well enough? Only one way to find out. The Townsend was closer to the downed airplane than any of the other ships. She sped toward where it went down. By the time she got there, the dive bomber had already sunk. But George joined in the cheers on deck: an inflatable life raft bobbed in the blue, blue water. Two men crouched inside. A third, in a life jacket, floated nearby. They all waved frantically. One of them fired a flare pistol, though daylight overwhelmed the red glow.

Lines with life rings attached flew over the ship’s side. The downed fliers put them on. Eager sailors hauled the men up on deck. “God bless you guys,” said the one whom George helped rescue. “You’re prettier than my wife right now.”

He had a nasty cut over one eye and burns on his face and hands. All things considered, he was lucky. The fellow who wore the life jacket couldn’t stand. “Broken leg,” somebody by him said. “Get him down to sick bay.”

“I don’t mind,” the injured man said as they laid him on a stretcher. “I figured I’d be holding a lily. But Jack there, he did a fuck of a job.”

“I hear somebody else was in trouble, too,” said the flier with the cuts and burns-Jack? “I hope some of you sailor fellows find him, too.”

“We’ll look for him, pal. That’s what we’re here for,” a sailor said. “Ought to get you down to sick bay, too. I bet you need stitches.”

“For what?” Jack didn’t even seem to know he was hurt. They took him below anyway.

A fighter was flying slow circles over where the other airplane went down, about forty miles east of the Townsend’s rescue. But all the destroyers and cruiser found when they got there was an oil slick and a little floating wreckage-no sign of the crew.

“Too bad,” George said.

“Can’t win ’em all,” Fremont Dalby said. “We broke even. Way things usually work out, that puts us ahead of the game.”

“I guess,” George said. The rescued men were here, yes. But the poor bastards who didn’t make it out of their airplane…They didn’t break even. They lost. Breaking even only mattered if you were on the outside.