The Grapple

VII

Flora Blackford was listening to a Navy captain testifying about support for black rebels in the Confederate state of Cuba when a page approached her and whispered, “Excuse me, Congresswoman, but you have an urgent telephone call outside.”

“Who is it?” she whispered back. This wasn’t the most exciting testimony the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War had ever heard, but it was important.

“Assistant Secretary Roosevelt,” the page answered.

“Oh.” Flora got to her feet. “Please excuse me,” she told her colleagues. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

The page led her to one of the telephones outside the hearing room. “He’s on this line.”

“Thank you.” Flora picked up the handset and said, “This is Congresswoman Blackford.”

“Hello, Flora,” Franklin Roosevelt said. “Can you come by here?”

“Right this minute?” she asked.

“Well, you might want to,” Roosevelt answered. And what did that mean? Something like, If you don’t you’ll be sorry. Flora couldn’t think of anything else it was likely to mean.

“On my way,” she said, and hung up. “Please apologize to the rest of the committee for me,” she told the page. “I’m afraid I need to confer with the Assistant Secretary of War.” The young man nodded and hurried away. Flora wondered what kind of connections he had, to be wearing a sharp blue suit instead of a green-gray uniform. She also wondered how long he would go on wearing his suit. Congressional pages did get conscripted. At least one had got killed.

And, as she hurried to the exit, she wondered what the other members of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War would think. People knew she often talked with Franklin Roosevelt. She hoped to heaven they didn’t know why. If they didn’t know why, what would they think? That she and Roosevelt were having an affair? He was married, but that mattered little in high government circles. Reporters knew better than to write such stories. People called it a gentleman’s agreement, though Flora had never seen anything very gentlemanly about it.

She walked over to the War Department. Sentries there scrupulously compared the photo on her ID card to her face. They searched her handbag. A woman took her into a closed room and patted her down. And they called Roosevelt’s office to make sure she was expected. Only when they were fully satisfied did a soldier escort her to that office far underground.

“Call when you need to come back up, ma’am,” the soldier said: a polite way of warning, Don’t go wandering around by yourself.

“I will,” Flora promised.

Roosevelt’s chief secretary or administrative assistant or whatever he was led her in to the Assistant Secretary of War. Then the man left, closing the door behind him. Did he knew about the work on uranium bombs? Flora wouldn’t have cared to guess one way or the other.

“How are you, Franklin?” she asked.

“Oh, a little tired, but not too bad,” he answered. He looked worn and weary, as if he was running on too much coffee, too many cigarettes in that jaunty holder of his, and not enough sleep. Few people with important jobs were doing anything else. He nodded, perhaps trying to make himself believe it. “No, I’m not too bad myself, but the news could be better.”

“What is the news?” Flora asked.

“The Confederates bombed our Hanford facility in the wee small hours this morning.”

“Gevalt!” She sank into a chair. Her knees didn’t want to hold her up. “How bad is it? Do I want to know?”

“Well, it’s not good,” Roosevelt said. “They know we’re working on this, they knew where we’re working on it, they know it’s important, and they must be working on it, too, or they wouldn’t try so hard to shut us down.”

Every word of that was true. But he hadn’t told her what she most wanted to know. “How much damage did they do?”

“Oh. That.” His resonant laugh filled the office. “Now that the sun’s up out there, we can see it’s less than we feared at first. They don’t have aircraft that can carry heavy loads a long way, and it’s hard to bomb accurately at night anyway. They hit some of the works, but they didn’t damage the plant where we’re separating U-235 and U-238 or the pile-that’s what they’re calling the gadget that makes more energy than goes into it.”

“That would have been bad,” Flora said. “Repairing those things would take a long time.” She didn’t even mention money.

“Repair isn’t the only worry. If the bombers hit those, we’d have to worry about radioactive contamination like you wouldn’t believe,” Roosevelt said. Flora must have looked blank, for he went on, “That kind of thing can cause cancer. It can poison you. If it’s strong enough, it can come right out and kill you. And it’s very hard to clean up.”

“But it didn’t happen?” Flora said.

“It didn’t happen. Hardly any contamination, in fact,” Roosevelt said.

“Good-I guess.” Flora hadn’t even thought about-what did Roosevelt call it?-radioactive contamination. She hadn’t known such a thing was possible, or that anybody needed to worry about it. She was just starting to realize how much she didn’t know about this whole uranium business.

“It’s very good, believe me,” Roosevelt said. “They could have made things worse for us than they did. We’re not badly delayed, anyhow.”

“That is good,” Flora said. “What kind of program do the Confederate States have? How far along are they? How do we go about finding out?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, and we’ll have to find a way, respectively.” The Assistant Secretary of War sighed. “That’s all I can tell you right now. As I say, they’re working on it, the same as we are. We’re in a race, and we’d better win.”

Eight words. As far as Flora could see, they said everything that needed saying. “If we knew where they’re working, we could visit them the same way they just visited us,” she said.

“If we knew that, we would have done it a long time ago,” Roosevelt said. “We’ve got to look harder, that’s all.”

“It’s a long way from Confederate territory to Washington State,” Flora said. “That’s one of the reasons you put the uranium works out there, I suppose. How did they manage to fly bombers all the way up there? And what happened to them afterwards?”

“They got cute,” Franklin Roosevelt said unhappily. “I don’t know what else to tell you. They flew a whole swarm of airplanes out of northwestern Sonora. Some of them headed for Los Angeles. Some attacked Las Vegas and Boulder Dam in Nevada. And some…some we just forgot about.” He looked angry and embarrassed at the same time. “Airplanes flying over the middle of the country-too many people assumed they were ours and didn’t worry about them. That won’t happen again, either.”

“They didn’t go back to the CSA, did they?” Flora asked.

He shook his strong-chinned head. “No. We might have done something about that. I hope to heaven we would have done something about it, anyhow. But they flew on to Vancouver Island and landed at strips there. The crews were gone by the time we got people there, and they set fire to the airplanes-or maybe the Canadians who helped them get away did. I don’t know about that. I do know it was a very smart operation, and we’re lucky it didn’t hurt us a lot worse than it did.”

“What can we do to make sure it doesn’t happen again?” Flora asked.

“You do know the right questions to ask,” Roosevelt said. Flattery? Truth? Both at once? He went on, “From now on, we’ll have fighters overhead all the time. That’s effective immediately. We’ll beef up the antiaircraft guns as soon as we can, and we’ll put a Y-ranging station close by so we can spot the enemy a long way off. And we’ll hit Confederate airports in Sonora and Chihuahua and even Texas to make it harder for them to fly up north.”

“What do we do about auto bombs? What do we do about people bombs?” Flora asked.

“Well, the area is well fenced, and the fences are a long way out from the buildings-for one thing, we need room if experiments get out of hand,” Roosevelt answered. “We have a garrison there.” He wrote himself a note. “We’d better reinforce it, and we’d better add some armored vehicles, too. You do know the right questions.” Maybe he really meant it this time.

“Did we lose any important people?” Flora asked.

“No. Absolutely not. No. We don’t have as many first-rate physicists as Germany does, but we’ve got plenty of good people to take us where we’re going,” Roosevelt said. “And the bombers didn’t hit any of them last night, so that’s all right. If we find the Confederates’ project, striking them will hurt them more, or I hope so, anyway. They only have a third as many educated people as we do. They can’t afford to lose anybody.”

“One more part of the price they pay for leaving their Negroes as nothing but field hands,” Flora said.

“I agree. But they aren’t even field hands now. They’re…” Roosevelt paused.

“Victims.” Flora supplied a word.

“Yes, that’s what they are.” Roosevelt shook his head. “Strange to use a word like that in this day and age. Strange to use it like that, anyhow. If people drown in a flood, they’re victims. If a man runs a stop light and kills a grandmother, she’s a victim. But those aren’t accidents in the CSA. The Freedom Party is doing it on purpose.”

“Nobody up here wanted to believe that for the longest time,” Flora said.

“I still don’t want to believe it,” Franklin Roosevelt said. “But I have no choice. It’s true, all right. You deserve a lot of credit for making people see that.”

“I don’t want it. I wish I didn’t have it,” Flora said. “And speaking of such things, what are we doing to help the Negroes in Richmond?”

“What we can, which isn’t much,” the Assistant Secretary of War answered. “Our fighters strafe the Confederates. We bomb their positions as we can. Some of the weapons the Negroes are using, they got from us. Smuggling arms isn’t easy, but we do what we can.”

“The Confederates did a pretty good job of helping the Mormons in Utah,” Flora said.

“More space and fewer people out there,” Roosevelt replied. “Getting things into Richmond’s never been easy. The Negroes are making the most of what we got them-and of what they got on their own. I will say that for them.”

“They really can fight, can’t they?”

“It does seem that way.”

“Then why doesn’t the U.S. Army let our Negroes put on the uniform and go after the Confederates?” Flora asked. “God knows they have the incentive to do it.”

“I can’t change that policy myself, you know,” Roosevelt said.

Flora nodded impatiently. “Yes, of course. But you can recommend a course of action to the President. He could change it by executive order-I don’t think he needs the consent of Congress to enlist Negro troops.”

“I’d say you’re right about that,” Roosevelt replied. “My one worry is, I don’t know how our white soldiers would like Negroes fighting alongside of them.”

“Who’d have a better reason to fight hard than colored troops?” Flora said. “If I were a black man in uniform, I wouldn’t want to surrender to the Confederates. Would you?”

“When you put it that way, no,” Roosevelt admitted. “I’ll speak to President La Follette about this. You might do the same. The final decision will be up to him, though.”

“Yes,” Flora said. For the past year, Charlie La Follette wasn’t just someone who could help make the upper Midwest vote Socialist. He was the man who decided things, and he seemed to be doing it well enough. “I’ll talk to him, and we’ll see what happens after that.”

Brakes squealing, the train pulled into the station. “Riviere-du-Loup!” the conductor called. “All out for Riviere-du-Loup!” He spoke French, as most people did in the Republic of Quebec.

Dr. Leonard O’Doull hardly noticed. To him, French seemed at least as natural as English. Home, he thought, and got to his feet. After two years away, Riviere-du-Loup looked very good indeed. After almost two years of war, the Republic of Quebec-officially neutral in the war that convulsed the rest of North America-looked very good indeed, too.

People waiting on the platform waved as he and two other men and a woman got off the train. Nicole dashed up to him. He squeezed the air out of his wife, then did the same with his son. “You should get married more often, Lucien,” he said. “It lets me take leave.”

Lucien O’Doull sent him a severe look. “You’re as bad as Uncle Georges,” he said. “I only intend to get married once, thank you very much.”

“As bad as me? Thank you very much, Lucien.” Georges Galtier, the younger of Nicole’s two brothers, was the family wit, the family cynic, the family punster and practical joker. Most of the Galtiers were swarthy and slight. Georges was dark, but almost as tall as Leonard O’Doull, and half again as wide through the shoulders. His older brother, Charles, stopped picking on him in a hurry when he began to get his full growth. Charles was no coward, but also no fool. No Galtiers were fools.

Charles came up to O’Doull now. He looked achingly like his father. Lucien Galtier, after whom O’Doull’s son was named, was several years dead. “Good to see you again,” Charles said gravely. “Good to see you safe.” He sounded like his father, too, though he didn’t have much of the old man’s whimsy. Georges had got all of that, and a little more besides. They both made successful farmers, though. Crops didn’t care if you were funny or not.

Hand in hand with Lucien stood his fiancee. Paulette Archambault was a dentist’s daughter; the match, if not made in heaven, was certainly one that had a lot of study behind it. Paulette had black hair and blue eyes and a nice figure. O’Doull had no trouble understanding what his son saw in her. “Welcome to the family,” he said.

“Thank you very much,” Paulette said. “There’s…a lot of it, isn’t there?”

As if to prove her point, Nicole’s three sisters, Susanne, Denise, and Jeanne, greeted O’Doull, too, each with a husband at her side. Jeanne, the youngest, was pregnant again. O’Doull tried to remember if this would be her fifth or sixth. He couldn’t. But all the Galtier children had big broods except for Nicole. Lucien O’Doull might be an only child, but he was an only with a raft of first cousins.

“You look tired,” Jeanne told Leonard O’Doull. She was a farm wife with a flock of children, and she was telling him he looked tired? If that wasn’t madness, damned if he knew what would be.

O’Doull managed a-tired-shrug. “I’ve been busier than I wish I were,” he said, and let it go there. Coming back to a country of peace, a country at peace, felt surreal. He’d got used to the tensions of emergency surgery, to the cries of wounded men, to the smells of ether and alcohol and pus and blood and shit, to washing gore from his hands more often than Lady Macbeth ever did. The only familiar odor on the platform was tobacco smoke. Perfume? For all he’d smelled it lately, perfume might be a Martian invention.

“You look like a man who needs a drink,” his wife said.

“Amen!” he exclaimed. Everybody laughed except Nicole, who understood he wasn’t kidding. They’d known each other for more than a quarter of a century now. If one of them didn’t understand the other, nobody ever would.

“Let’s go back to the house,” Nicole said. With the six Galtier children and their spouses and progeny leaving, the platform lost a big part of the crowd on it.

A house with a lawn in front of it. No broken windows. No bullet holes. No chunks bitten out by artillery or bombs. No craters in the front yard. No gunshots close by. No soldiers stumbling by with numb, stunned faces and thousand-yard stares. No, this wasn’t Mars. It seemed more alien than that.

Instead of decay, O’Doull smelled cooking of a sort he’d almost forgotten. He knew Nicole would do herself proud when it came to food. But…“Will we have enough to drink?” A lot of his nieces and nephews were getting old enough to hoist a glass. And Georges always seemed to have a hollow leg.

But Nicole said, “Don’t worry about it.” He did worry, till she went on, “For one thing, I bought twice as much as I thought we’d need. And, for another, the farmer across the road from Charles makes the best applejack in Temiscouata County. He makes a lot of it, too.”

When Leonard O’Doull heard that, he stopped flabbling. A lot of people with apple orchards turned out homemade Calvados. Quality varied widely from one farm to another, often from one batch to another. None of it went through the tiresome formalities involving taxes. The Republic of Quebec loved distillers no more than the Dominion of Canada did before it, and had no better luck bringing them to heel.

O’Doull took packs of Raleighs and Dukes out of his suitcase and distributed them to his wife, his son, and his in-laws. They would have repaired his popularity had he lost it. Quebec got U.S. tobacco, and not enough of that. No one had tasted mild, flavorful cigarettes like these since the early days of the war.

“How did you get them through Customs?” Georges asked. His face was wreathed in smiles, and in smoke.

“I’m in U.S. uniform.” O’Doull tapped the gold oak leaf on one shoulder strap. “I speak pretty good French, too. And I let the inspectors have a couple of packs apiece, so they didn’t bother me a bit.”

“Such things are wasted on those swine, but what is a man to do?” Georges said with a philosophical shrug.

If the man was Leonard O’Doull, he was to eat too much and to get drunk. He wasn’t loud and boisterous, but he felt the applejack buzzing in him. He’d feel it in the morning, too, but he didn’t worry about that. He ate, he drank, he talked-and he didn’t tell war stories. His Quebecois extended family didn’t know how lucky they were not to know much about what he did, and he didn’t intend to enlighten them.

A lot of relatives stayed at the house. They slept in the front room, in the dining room, in the kitchen. O’Doull didn’t mind. Even now, not everybody had a motorcar. For those who didn’t, going back out to a farm and then coming into town again for the wedding the next day would be slow and inconvenient. All the same, he whispered to Nicole, “You didn’t ask one of your sisters to share the bedroom, did you?”

“Why would you want to know that?” his wife asked archly.

“Ha!” he said. “You’ll find out.”

“With so many people here?” Nicole said. “It’s upstairs, remember. If we’re not careful, the bed will squeak, and they’ll laugh at us.”

“We’ll just have to be careful, then, won’t we?” O’Doull said. Nicole was laughing at him, but she didn’t say no.

She didn’t say no later that night, either, though she did lock the door first and she did insist on turning off the light. After nearly two years away, O’Doull felt almost as if he were having his wedding night all over again, just ahead of his son’s. He didn’t have the stamina Lucien would doubtless display, but he had the sincerity.

“I’ve missed you more than I know how to tell you,” he said afterwards.

“Why did you go, then?” Nicole asked.

“It needs doing,” he answered. “I’m a doctor. I’m good at putting people back together. A good many men are alive because I happened to be there.”

“So they can go back to the war and get killed somewhere else instead,” Nicole said tartly.

He shrugged. That made the bed squeak, where their side-by-side lovemaking hadn’t, or not very much. It made Nicole squeak, too, in alarm. Laughing a little, O’Doull said, “I can’t do anything about that. God puts them where He wants them. I just patch them up when He looks the other way for a second.”

After the things he’d seen, he wondered how he still believed at all. Granny McDougald didn’t, not so far as he could tell. But his own faith survived…as long as he didn’t lean on it too hard. And he was strong-willed enough to make his own choices. As he usually did, he wore a rubber tonight. Nicole wasn’t likely to catch; she was close to fifty. But why take chances? And if that made the Pope unhappy-O’Doull didn’t lose much sleep about it.

He didn’t lose much sleep about anything. He couldn’t begin to guess how far behind he was. Nicole had to shake him awake the next morning. When he did come back to consciousness, the smells of coffee and of frying bacon helped reconcile him to the world. He found fried eggs and fried potatoes to go with the bacon. Susanne and Denise had been busy in the kitchen.

“Thank you, my dears,” he said after he finished breakfast. “You’re just about as wonderful as your sister.” They laughed. Susanne made as if to throw a spatula at him. He made as if to duck. Everybody laughed then. After flying shell fragments and machine-gun bullets, a spatula didn’t seem very dangerous.

He thought about wearing uniform to the wedding. He might have, if it were in the USA. In Riviere-du-Loup, he didn’t want to remind people he was a foreigner. He didn’t want to remind himself, either. His tailcoat smelled of mothballs, but he put it on anyway. It didn’t match Lucien’s hired suit, but that was all right: the groom was supposed to be noticed, while his father was perhaps the most easily disposable person in the wedding party. He wasn’t even footing the bill-Alphonse Archambault was.

Doctor and dentist greeted each other at the Eglise St.-Patrice with a handshake and identical words: “Hello, quack.” They laughed and clapped each other on the back.

Bishop Guillaume celebrated the mass. He wasn’t a patch on the former Bishop Pascal, who’d returned to secular life, but his lady friend hadn’t had twins, either, which was why the former Bishop Pascal had returned to secular life.

Lucien lifted Paulette’s veil and kissed her. The O’Doulls and the Archambaults stood in a receiving line and shook enough hands to make politicians jealous. Then everyone repaired to the Archambaults’ house-only a few blocks from the O’Doulls’-and ate and drank with as much abandon as people had the day before. Archambault had either talked with Charles or knew somebody else who made damn good applejack.

Riviere-du-Loup didn’t have a hotel. O’Doull and Nicole went down to old Lucien’s farm-run by Charles these days-to give Lucien and Paulette the privacy they needed for their first night. In the morning, the newlyweds would catch a train to honeymoon at Niagara Falls-on the American side, not the Canadian. The Canadian side was under martial law.

Nicole squeezed O’Doull’s hand when they rolled past the hospital built on what was once Galtier land. “If the occupiers hadn’t wanted to punish your father by putting the hospital there, we probably wouldn’t have met,” O’Doull said.

“See how many things we can blame on them?” Charles said from behind the wheel, his voice as dry as if he were Georges.

“Since Father did eventually get paid, I suppose we can forgive them now,” Nicole said.

“You don’t have any other reasons?” O’Doull asked, and she poked him in the ribs.

The farmhouse hadn’t changed much with Charles living there. Even most of the furniture was the same as it had been. “So many memories,” Nicole murmured.

O’Doull nodded. He had a lot of memories of this place, too, though not so many as she did. But he also had other memories, more recent ones, darker ones. All too soon, he would have to get back on a train for himself, not for a honeymoon but to return to nightmare. What was I doing? What was I thinking? he wondered. Even though he saved lives, even though he wanted to save lives, he also wanted to stay here. He knew he couldn’t, and got drunk again so he didn’t have to remember.

Spring in Georgia. What could be finer? Mild air, occasional showers, everything green and growing, the countryside full of birdsong, hummingbirds flitting like bad-tempered jewels from flower to flower. Everything was lovely.

Cassius noticed none of it. He cared about none of it. All he wanted to do was stay alive one more minute, one more hour, one more day.

Had he gone to church with his family in Augusta that Sunday morning, he wouldn’t be wandering the Georgia countryside now. When his father and mother and sister didn’t come back, he went looking for them-and almost ran right into the cops and Freedom Party stalwarts who’d rounded them up. The ofays were still laughing and joking about their haul, and didn’t notice him in the shadows. Every once in a while, a dark skin came in handy.

Of course, if he were born with a white skin, he wouldn’t have ended up shut in behind barbed wire in the Terry like a zoo animal. He would have been on the other side of the wire-probably with a submachine gun in his hand and a Freedom Party pin on his lapel.

He didn’t dwell on that. He did realize he had to get out of the Terry, and right away. If he didn’t, the whites would nab him in a cleanout before long. Off he’d go to a camp. People didn’t come out of those places.

He waited till after midnight that night. He had two weapons when he headed for the wire-a pair of tin snips and the biggest, stoutest knife from his mother’s kitchen. If anyone spotted him, he aimed to fight. If he could kill somebody with a gun, then he’d have one. He didn’t think about dying himself. He was too young to take the idea seriously.

All the heroics he imagined ahead of time evaporated. The tin snips cut through the wire well enough. Come morning, people would have no trouble figuring out where he’d got away, but he didn’t care. He’d be long gone by then.

And he was, heading west. He couldn’t very well stay inside Augusta. It wouldn’t be thirty seconds till he heard, Let’s see your papers, boy! Nothing in his passbook said he had any business being out and about. Again, they’d ship him off to a camp-or maybe they’d just kill him on the spot.

Out in the country…There’d be more Negroes there. Maybe he’d fit in better. And then he could start paying the Freedom Party goons back for everything they were doing.

He’d had connections with the resistance in the city-had them and lost them as people kept dying or getting seized. Now he had to rely on his wits and on the kindness of strangers: black strangers, of course. He’d long since given up on expecting anything from whites. His father always said he got on well with Jerry Dover. He even said Dover had kept their whole family safe more than once. Maybe so-but Dover was in the Army now, and the rest of Cassius’ family was in a camp.

When the sun came up, Cassius was walking along a road heading west. He didn’t know where he was going. All he knew was that he’d made it out of Augusta alive, and that he was getting hungry and getting thirsty. All the money that had been in the apartment was in his pocket. How long could he make $27.59 (he’d counted it to the last penny-counted it twice, in fact, hoping it would be more the second time around and absurdly disappointed when it wasn’t) last? Well, he’d find out.

Maybe he’d find out. On the other hand, maybe he’d get killed before he came close to going through his meager funds. Every time he saw a motorcar, he ran for the pine woods through which the road ran most of the time. Nobody stopped to go after him. None of the vehicles that went by was an armored car, so nobody sprayed the woods with machine-gun fire.

That was good luck, as good luck for Negroes in the CSA ran these days.

Cassius didn’t see it so. Aside from being hungry and thirsty, he had sore feet. He couldn’t remember when he’d done so much walking. He didn’t think he ever had. He wondered if he ought to throw his shoes away. For a while, he didn’t. He didn’t want to look like a shiftless country nigger. He might have argued with his father, but his attitudes faithfully respected the way he was raised.

He did a little thinking. Why didn’t he want to look like a shiftless country nigger? Wasn’t that his best bet for survival? Away went the shoes, and his socks, too.

Don’t go barefoot. You get chiggers, an’ hookworm, too. His old man’s voice still rang in his ears, or rather, between them. Ignoring it wasn’t easy, but Cassius managed. The blisters on his heels sighed with relief. Before long, though, his soles started to complain.

And his luck ran out with the pine woods. For miles ahead, the road ran through fields: cotton, peanuts, tobacco, even rice. He couldn’t stay where he was. Living on what he could grub out of the ground-mushrooms and maybe berries-and on the squirrels and rabbits he killed with rocks wasn’t living. It was just starving a little more slowly. For better or for worse, he’d grown up in the city. No doubt there were tricks to living out here. Only one trouble: he didn’t know them.

He took a deep breath and set out down the road through the fields. A few years earlier, they would have been full of colored sharecroppers. Tractors and harvesters and combines drove Negroes off the land in swarms, though. Like so many towns in the CSA, Augusta had filled with farm workers who couldn’t find work. Having them in the cities made it easier for the Freedom Party to scoop them up, too.

Here came a motorcar. It was fairly new and in good repair-not noisy, not belching smoke. That made it a good bet to belong to a white man. Cassius straightened up, squared his shoulders, and kept walking along as if he had every right to be there. Every Negro learned that trick: if you pretended you belonged somewhere, the ofays would believe you really did.

And it worked, damned if it didn’t. The driver here wasn’t a white man but a white woman, her blond hair blowing in the breeze that came in through the open windows. Her head didn’t even turn toward Cassius. As far as she was concerned, he was part of the scenery, like a cow or a dog or a turkey vulture sitting on a telegraph pole.

In a way, that was good. She didn’t notice him, and he couldn’t afford to be noticed. In another way…He thought he deserved to be more important than a cow or a dog or a turkey vulture. Whites in the CSA didn’t see things like that. They never had. Odds were they never would.

We have to make ’em see, Cassius thought fiercely.

Then a white did notice him, and it made his heart leap into his throat. He was walking past a farmhouse when somebody shouted, “Hey, you! Yeah, you, boy!” The farmer wore bib overalls and a big straw hat. He carried a shotgun, at the moment pointed down at the ground.

“What you want, uh, suh?” Cassius tried not to show how scared he was.

“You chop wood? Got me a pile of wood needs chopping,” the farmer said. “Pay you a dollar for it when you get done.”

Part of Cassius wanted to leap at that. The rest…The rest was naturally leery of trusting any white man. “Half a dollar now, half when I get through,” he said.

“Reckon I’d stiff you?” the farmer said. Cassius just spread his hands, as if to say you never could tell. The farmer shrugged. “All right. But if you take off halfway through, I’ll send the sheriff after you, hell with me if I don’t.”

“That’s fair,” Cassius allowed. “Reckon I could get me a ham sandwich an’ maybe a Dr. Hopper at noontime ’long with my other four bits?” If he was going to bargain, he’d go all out.

The farmer took the request in stride. “Don’t see why not. Good Book says something about not binding up the mouths of the kine that tread the grain. Reckon that goes for people, too.”

How could he quote the Bible and go along with what was happening to Negroes in the CSA? Maybe he didn’t go along, or not all the way, anyhow. He didn’t ask to see Cassius’ passbook, and he didn’t ask any inconvenient questions about what a young black man in city clothes was doing here.

As soon as Cassius saw the mountain of wood he was supposed to chop, he understood at once why the man didn’t ask questions. If he chopped all that, he’d earn his dollar three or four times over. He was tempted to light out with the farmer’s two quarters in his pocket. One thing held him back: fear. County sheriffs were supposed to use bloodhounds to track people, just the way their grandfathers did back in slavery days. If this one caught him…He didn’t want to think about that.

With a sigh, he set to work. Before long, sweat ran down his face even though the weather wasn’t too warm. He got blisters on his palms bigger than the ones on his heels. The farmer came to check on him, took a look at those, and gave him strips of cloth to wrap around his hands. They helped.

At least an hour before noon, the man brought him an enormous sandwich, a big slice of sweet-potato pie, and a cool Dr. Hopper. The bottle was dripping; maybe it had been in the well. “Much obliged, suh,” Cassius said.

“You’re doing an honest job,” the farmer said. “Looks like you could use a meal.”

“Maybe some.” Cassius wolfed down the food. He savored the Dr. Hopper, and smiled when bubbles went up his nose. “Can I pour a bucket o’ water over my head? Feel mighty good if I do.”

“Go right ahead,” the farmer answered.

Cassius walked over to the well and did. He finished somewhere between three and four in the afternoon. The farmer didn’t make any fuss about giving him the second installment of his pay, and even brought him another sandwich without being asked. “Thank you kindly,” Cassius said with his mouth full.

“Want to stick around for a spell?” the white man asked him. “I could use a hand, and you pull your weight. Say…four dollars a week and board?”

The money was chicken feed, though a place to sleep and three-or at least two-meals a day made up for some of that. But Cassius shook his head. “I better keep movin’ on,” he said.

“You won’t find many better deals,” the farmer warned.

Not from ofays, Cassius thought. With Negroes, though, he had a chance for something this fellow couldn’t hope to give him: vengeance. That still burned in him. “Obliged,” he said again, “but I got places to go.”

“And I know where you’ll end up: in trouble,” the farmer said. “You come sneakin’ round here after dark raisin’ Cain, I’ll give you a bellyful of double-aught buckshot. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

That meant guerrillas were active in these parts: for Cassius, good news. Still, he said, “I wouldn’t do nothin’ like that with you, suh. You treated me fair. You treated me better’n fair, an’ I know it.”

“How long will you remember, though?” The white man shrugged. “Reckon we’re quits. I don’t have anything against you-you did a job of work there. Ain’t seen anybody go at it like that for a long time.”

“I was hungry,” Cassius said with a shrug.

“Makes a difference,” the farmer agreed.

“You know what they’re doin’ in the city, suh?” Cassius asked. “You know they got all the niggers shut up inside barbed wire? You know they’re takin’ ’em to camps an’ killin’ ’em? They took my ma and my pa and my sister yesterday.”

“No. I didn’t know any of that. They don’t talk about it much,” the farmer said.

Only after Cassius was a couple of miles down the road, still another sandwich tied up in a rag, did he realize the man had to be lying. Who were they? What did they say? He wondered why the man bothered to waste time lying to a black. Why not just tell the truth and gloat? One answer occurred to him after another half a mile or so. He’d been closer to the axe than the farmer was, and he’d shown he knew how to use it.

Armstrong Grimes was fit to be tied, and he didn’t care who knew it. What was his reward, what was his regiment’s reward, what was his division’s reward for making the Mormons realize they couldn’t throw enough bodies on the fire to put it out? Why, to go to Canada, to go up against a bigger rebellion. He’d called the shot too well.

“How many people in Utah?” he demanded of Yossel Reisen.

“I don’t know,” his fellow sergeant answered as the train rattled along through the upper Midwest-or maybe it was in Canada. One stretch of plain looked just as dreary as another. Yossel went on, “Half a million, maybe?”

“Yeah, and not all of ’em were Mormons, either,” Armstrong said. “All right-how many people in Canada?”

“Millions,” Reisen said. “Got to be millions.”

“Fuckin’-A it does. That’s what I figure, too,” Armstrong said. “So what do we have to do? Kill every goddamn one of them?”

“Hey, don’t get sore at me,” Yossel told him. “I didn’t give the orders. I’ve got to take ’em, same as you do.”

“I’ll tell you what’s sore. My ass is sore,” Armstrong grumbled. The car he was in had hard benches packed too close together to squeeze in as many soldiers as possible. The smell and a dense cloud of cigarette smoke thickened the air. The Army cared nothing for comfort. It valued efficiency much more. Armstrong shifted from one weary cheek to the other. He nudged his buddy. “You oughta write your Congresswoman.”

“Armstrong, the first time you said that, it was funny,” Yossel Reisen said. “The fifth time you said it, I could put up with it. By now, though, by now it gives me a fucking pain in the ass, you know?”

“All right, already. Got a butt?” Armstrong asked.

“Sure.” Yossel passed him a pack. He lit up. It helped pass the time. When Armstrong returned the pack, Reisen stuck one in his mouth. Armstrong leaned close to give him a light. After Yossel’s first drag, he said, “We’ve got to lick the damn Confederates. If we don’t, we’ll be stuck with our own shitty tobacco forever.”

“There you go.” Armstrong blew out a cloud of smoke. “One more reason to hate Jake Featherston. I thought I already knew ’em all. We’ve got to kick his scrawny butt, all right. I wish we could do it, too, instead of fucking around with the goddamn stinking worthless Canucks.”

Yossel chuckled. “I don’t quite follow you. Tell us how you really feel.”

Before Armstrong could answer, he discovered they were already in Canada: somebody shot out a window in his railroad car. The bullet missed everybody, but glass sprayed soldiers. Everybody jumped and yelled and swore.

Machine gunners on the roofs of two or three cars opened up on the sniper. Armstrong had no idea if they hit him, but he did hope they made the bastard keep his head down. Then he said, “My guys-you all right?” He still had his platoon. No eager young second looey had come out to take his place.

“I got somethin’ in my eye, Sarge,” somebody right behind him said. “Is it glass?”

“Lemme see.” Awkwardly, Armstrong turned around. “Don’t blink, Boone, for Christ’s sake.” He yanked at the private’s eyelid. Damned if he didn’t see a chunk of glass not much bigger than a grain of salt. “Don’t flinch, either, dammit.”

“I’ll try,” Boone said. Not flinching when somebody’s hand came at your eye was probably harder than holding steady in combat. The soldier managed…pretty well.

“Hang on.” Armstrong peered down at his thumb. Sure as hell, he’d got the glass out. He flicked it away. “Blink. How’s your eye?”

“Better, Sarge,” Boone said in glad surprise. “Thanks a million.” He blinked again. “Yeah, it’s all right now.”

“Bully.” Armstrong didn’t know why he said that. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d used it. He couldn’t remember if he’d ever used it. Even his old man hardly ever said it. But getting something out of somebody’s eye made you feel fatherly, and fathers talked in old-fashioned ways.

Yossel Reisen gave him a quizzical look. “Bully?”

“Well, what about it?” Armstrong snapped. He was embarrassed he’d come out with it, too.

“Nothing,” Yossel said. But it wasn’t nothing, because he added, “You sounded like George Custer, that’s all.”

“Thanks a lot, Yossel.” Armstrong had often wondered why his father gave him Custer’s middle name and not his first one. George Grimes would have been a perfectly ordinary handle. Armstrong…wasn’t. He shrugged. Yossel had a funnier name yet, although maybe not if you were a Jew.

A few minutes later, the train screeched and squealed to a stop. They weren’t anywhere that Armstrong could see-just out in the middle of the damn prairie. Before long, though, officers started yelling, “Out! Out!”

“What the fuck?” Boone said. Armstrong only shrugged. He didn’t know what was going on, either.

He was standing out on the prairie with his men, waiting for somebody to tell him what to do next. Either nobody was in a hurry to do that or nobody knew. He looked around. In Utah, he’d got used to always having mountains on the horizon. No mountains here. This was the flattest country he’d ever seen; it made Ohio look like the Himalayas. The train tracks stretched out toward infinity. As far as he could tell, the two rails met there.

“Next town ahead is Rosenfeld!” yelled somebody with a loud, authoritative voice. “Canucks ran the Frenchies out of there, and they hold the train station. We’re going to take it back from them. Rosenfeld sits at a railway junction, so we need the place if we’re going to be able to use both lines. You got that?”

“Goddamn Frenchies,” Armstrong muttered. The soldiers from the Republic of Quebec showed no enthusiasm for fighting their former countrymen. He’d heard Mexican troops in the CSA didn’t jump up and down at the idea of shooting at-and getting shot by-the spooks down there. Both sets of soldiers from small countries probably figured they didn’t really want to do big countries’ dirty work for them. Well, the hell with ’em, he thought. I don’t want to get my ass shot off, either.

Yossel Reisen, on the other hand, summed things up in half a dozen words: “This is where we came in.” Armstrong grunted and nodded. They’d got off the train and fought their way forward in Utah, too.

He hoped the Canadians wouldn’t be as fanatical as the Mormons. He had trouble imagining how they could be, but a soldier’s life was full of nasty surprises. The men in green-gray shook themselves out into skirmish lines and moved forward. A woman with hair once red but now mostly gray stood outside her farmhouse staring at them as they tramped past.

“She saw Americans come this way in 1914, too,” Yossel murmured.

“Yeah, and her husband probably made bombs or something,” Armstrong said. Yossel trudged on for another couple of paces, then nodded.

One good thing, as far as Armstrong was concerned: this flat, flat ground offered far fewer ambush points than Utah’s rougher terrain. The first gunfire came from a farmhouse and its outbuildings. The American soldiers went after the strongpoints with practiced ease. Machine guns made the Canadians stay down. Mortar teams dropped bombs on the buildings and set some afire. Only then did foot soldiers approach. A few Canucks opened up on them. More mortar and machine-gun fire silenced the position.

Then something new was added to the mix. A beat-up old pickup truck bounced across the fields. It turned broadside to the American soldiers. “Get down!” Armstrong yelled to his men. Whatever the bastard driving that truck was doing, it didn’t look friendly.

And it wasn’t. Two Canucks in the pickup’s staked bed served a machine gun on a tall mount. The gun chattered. Bullets sprayed toward the Americans. Wounded soldiers shouted and screamed. A few men in green-gray had the presence of mind to shoot back, but only a few. Leaving a trail of dust in the distance, the truck bucketed away.

“Jesus!” Armstrong said, and then, “Well, I will be damned.”

“How come?” Yossel Reisen asked.

“Because here’s a way to make our lives miserable the fucking Mormons never thought of,” Armstrong answered. He pointed toward the pickup, which was long out of range. “It’s not as good as a barrel, but they can sure as shit chew us up from long range if they’ve got more than one or two of those stinking things. And they will. Bet your ass they will.” He spoke with a veteran’s ingrained pessimism.

Yossel didn’t tell him he was wrong. The other sergeant did say, “A couple-three rounds through the engine block and those trucks won’t go anywhere fast.”

“Sure-if we can do it,” Armstrong said. “What about this guy, though? We never laid a glove on the mother.”

“He surprised us,” Yossel said.

“Sure as shit surprised me,” Armstrong agreed. “Damn near punctured me besides.” He’d lasted two years with nothing worse than cuts and bruises and scrapes. He wanted to go on lasting, too. He’d seen too many horrible things happen to other people. He knew much too well that they could also happen to him.

“Now we know they’ve got ’em,” Yossel said. “We’ll spread our machine guns out more or whatever the hell. No soft-skinned trucks are going to make monkeys out of us.”

“Ook,” Armstrong said, and scratched under his armpits. Yossel gave him the finger, but he didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, he was dead right. That damn machine gun must have wounded eight or ten men. The Americans were flabbling as if it was going out of style, but they weren’t doing anything except flabbling. One lousy pickup truck knocked them back on their heels.

They needed most of an hour to start moving forward again. Half a mile closer to Rosenfeld, another defended farmhouse held them up. As soon as they went to the ground, two pickup trucks showed up. They stayed at extreme range and blazed away. Most of their bullets were bound to go wild. A few, though-a few would wound or kill.

Somebody with an antibarrel cannon made either a lucky shot or a great one and set a pickup on fire. The other truck zoomed up alongside, picked up the men who got out, and roared off. Despite all the U.S. bullets and shells that flew toward it, it got away.

“How many little trucks do you suppose the Canucks have?” Yossel asked.

Armstrong gave that the only possible answer: “Too goddamn many.” His buddy nodded.

They fought their way into Rosenfeld a couple of hours later. The Canadian fighters didn’t try to hold the little prairie town with the fanatical determination the Mormons showed over every inch of ground in Utah. But Canada had a hell of a lot more inches than Utah did. The defenders headed north, toward Winnipeg. They would make another stand somewhere else. Only at the train station and a diner called Pomeroy’s did they put up much of a fight.

The Canucks wrecked the tracks in the station, blew up the building, and escaped. Pomeroy’s was a different story. The rebels who holed up there didn’t run and didn’t give up. The only person who got out of the burning, battered building was a little boy about six years old. He’d lost the last joint of his left little finger. Otherwise, he didn’t seem badly hurt.

“What’s your name, kid?” Armstrong asked as he bandaged the boy’s hand.

“I’m Alec.” The boy looked at him. “You must be a goddamn Yank.”

“Yeah, well, I love you, too.” Armstrong pulled a squashed chocolate bar out of his pocket. “Here. Want it?”

“Thank you,” Alec said gravely. “But you’re still a goddamn Yank.”

“You better believe it, you little bastard,” Armstrong told him, not without pride.

Vienna, Georgia, was as far as east as Spartacus’ guerrilla band had gone since Jonathan Moss and Nick Cantarella joined them. Spartacus insisted on pronouncing the name of the place as Vie-enna. So did everybody else who talked about it. From everything Moss heard, it probably didn’t hold two thousand people. But its name was proudly distinct from that of the capital of Austria-Hungary.

Mexican soldiers and overage white men patrolled the roads. The Negroes moved cross-country, past the ghosts of what had been their lives till the Freedom Party turned on them. The countryside was achingly empty: so many people either gone to towns to look for work or just gone, period.

Nick Cantarella was chortling over an article in a three-day-old copy of the Albany Gazette somebody had brought into camp. “Listen to this,” he said, nudging Moss with his elbow. “‘Brave Canadian patriots with machine guns mounted on the back of pickup trucks have inflicted heavy casualties on the brutal U.S. occupiers in a series of lightning-like hit-and-run raids.’ Isn’t that terrific?”

Moss gave the U.S. infantry captain a quizzical glance. “Well, I guess it depends on whose side you’re on.”

“Oh.” Cantarella laughed some more. “Yeah, sure. But it’s a terrific idea. We could do that right here. We should do it. And I was just laughing on account of Jake Featherston’s propaganda asswipe told me about it.”

“All right. Now I get it. Color me dumb,” Moss said. “Yeah, we could build a machine-gun mount if we had ourselves a truck.”

“Bet your ass we could,” Cantarella said. “Couple-three of these smokes are better mechanics than half the guys you’d find in a motor pool. They’re used to working with scrap metal and junk, ’cause they couldn’t get anything else.”

“Let’s talk to Spartacus,” Moss said.

They put their case to the guerrilla leader. “Ain’t hard gettin’ us a truck, or as many as we need,” he said. “All we gots to do is steal ’em.” He took the prospect for granted. “Wish we had us mo’ machine guns. We could fit ’em out like they was tanks, damn near.” That was the old-fashioned British word for barrels.

Cantarella shook his head. “Well, no, not quite. The thing about barrels is, they’re armored. Somebody shoots up one of these trucks, it’s gonna be shot up, all right. Can’t get too gay with ’em, or you’ll be sorry quick. You hear what I’m sayin’?”

“I hear you,” Spartacus answered. “Makes sense. Still and all…Reckon we can git some o’ the ofays round these parts to shit their pants?” He grinned.

“Oh, I think we might. I think we just might,” Cantarella answered. “We ought to make the mount so we can take it off a truck in a hurry. Sometimes a truck will get shot up. Sometimes we’ll have to leave it behind ’cause we can’t hide it. Shame to have to build a whole new mount again if something like that happens, you know?”

“That makes sense, too,” Spartacus allowed. His grin got wider. “We’s gonna put trouble on wheels.”

“Hell, yes,” Cantarella said.

Three pickups walked with Jesus in Vienna that very night. The guerrilla band’s blacksmiths got to work on one the next morning. Spartacus stashed the other two in an abandoned Negro village a few miles outside of town. Jonathan Moss found places like that heartbreaking. How many of them were there, from one end of the CSA to the other? And what happened to the people who used to live in them? Nothing good-that was only too plain.

The colored blacksmiths got the idea about fitting a machine gun on a truck as soon as Cantarella started explaining. One of them-a man named Caligula-said, “Don’t need to give us no sermon on the mount, suh.” He sent the white man a sly smile.

Cantarella winced. Moss groaned. The Negroes broke up. Moss looked at them with new eyes from then on. Anyone who made puns that bad was-damn near had to be-a real live human being, and deserved to be slapped down just like anybody else.

And the mount the blacksmiths came up with was beautifully simple. They fastened a short length of upright iron pipe to the truck bed. If they lost the truck, they would lose it, too. Into it they stuck a longer pipe whose outer diameter matched the inner diameter of the bottom part of the mount. And on top of that they fixed the machine gun.

Jonathan Moss admired the result. “If you were going to make these as a regular thing, you couldn’t do any better,” he said. “Where did the pipe come from?”

“Reckon some plumber wonder where the pipe go, suh,” Caligula answered with another sidelong grin.

All the Negroes were eager to take their new toy out on the road, so eager that they almost came to blows. They all knew how to serve the machine gun. Only a handful of them, though, could drive. That was funny, in a frightening way. Spartacus sidled up to Moss and asked, “How you like to be our driver?”

How would I like that? Moss wondered. He was less useful to the guerrillas than Nick Cantarella, simply because he knew less about the infantryman’s trade. But he damn well could drive a truck. “Sure,” he said after no more than a second’s hesitation. “Put somebody who knows where he’s going in the cab with me, though. I didn’t grow up around here, so I don’t know all the little back roads that’ll get me out of trouble.”

“I go with you my ownself,” Spartacus said. “Reckon I knows this country tolerable good.” He let out a nasty chuckle. “Reckon we gonna give the ofays a little bit of a surprise, too. Yeah, jus’ a li’l bit.”

What will the Confederates do to me if they recapture me fighting alongside the black guerrillas? Moss decided he didn’t want to know, not in any detail. He also decided he couldn’t afford to be taken, not any more. “Let me have a pistol,” he said, and mimed shooting himself in the head.

“Oh, yes. We takes care o’ dat,” Spartacus promised, and he did. The.45 he handed Moss the next morning was an officer’s sidearm. It would do the job, all right.

Strategy was simplicity itself. About an hour after sunup, they set off up the road from Vienna, heading north toward the even smaller town of Pinehurst about ten miles away. Anything they passed, they shot up. The first auto they came up to was driven by a fat, gray-haired white man. He started to give Moss a friendly smile as the pickup truck passed his beat-up gray Birmingham. The smile changed to a look of horror when he saw Spartacus on the seat beside Moss. A moment later, a burst of machine-gun fire finished him and set his motorcar on fire.

Spartacus and the blacks in the back all whooped. “Do Jesus!” the guerrilla leader yelled. “This here gonna be fun!”

That white man wouldn’t think so. But then, if he was one of the yahoos who went around yelling, “Freedom!” he was helping the Confederate States’ government visit wholesale slaughter on their blacks. If he happened to get in the way of a little retail slaughter coming the other way-well, too damn bad.

A tractor sat in a cotton field not far from the side of the road. “Stop the truck!” Spartacus told Moss. He followed the black man’s order. Spartacus pointed out the window. “Put some holes in that fucker!” he yelled. The gun crew obeyed. The tractor sent a plume of black, greasy smoke up into the sky.

They wrecked two more tractors and a combine. Jonathan Moss nodded to himself. Those were the tools that let white farmers get along without black sharecroppers. They were handy, yes, but they were also expensive. How would those whites like watching them go up in flames?

The gunners sprayed an oncoming automobile with bullets. It went off the road, flipped over, and burned like a torch. “This is fun!” Spartacus shouted. Moss nodded. Destruction for the sake of destruction brought a nasty thrill with it, almost as if he were a staid married man visiting a whorehouse.

There was a checkpoint outside of Pinehurst: a sleepy one, manned by three or four Great War veterans too old or too infirm to do anything more strenuous. They were just going through the motions. They didn’t expect any trouble as the pickup truck drew near. Spartacus ducked down so they couldn’t see him next to Moss.

When the machine gunners in the back of the pickup opened fire, the guards toppled like tenpins. “Git!” Spartacus told Moss. “Go left, then left again soon as you can.”

The road up to Pinehurst was paved; the one onto which Spartacus put Moss was nothing but a dirt track. Red dust rose in choking clouds, for it hadn’t rained lately. “The dust will let them track us,” Moss said.

“So what?” Spartacus answered. “We be long gone by the time they catch up to us-an’ if we ain’t, they be sorry.” He probably wasn’t wrong about that. Pursuers-even riflemen-coming up against a machine gun would get a lethal surprise.

He sent Moss and the pickup bouncing along back roads and tracks nobody who hadn’t known these parts for years would have been able to follow. Moss’ teeth clicked together more than once. They weren’t necessarily good tracks. One of them had a hog wallow right in the middle. Spartacus pointed straight ahead. Moss gunned the engine and leaned on the horn. The machine gunners solved the problem a different way. As hogs scrambled out of the muck, the gunners shot them.

The truck sprayed stinking mud as it went through. “Stop!” Spartacus yelled when it got to the other side. Moss hit the brakes. The machine-gun crew hopped out and threw three carcasses into the back of the pickup. “We don’t just shoot up the ofays,” Spartacus said happily. “We eats good today, too.”

A white man with a shotgun charged out of a farmhouse a couple of hundred yards away. He didn’t want to yield his porkers without a fight. The machine gunners sprayed a burst in his general direction. He ran away even faster than he’d come out.

“We don’t take shit from nobody!” Spartacus roared as Moss put the pickup in gear again. Riding around with a machine gun in the back of your truck worked wonders for your confidence.

Those side roads brought the pickup almost back to where its rampages had begun. The machine gun and the top part of the mount came off neat as you please. One of the gunners carried the weapon. The other shouldered the long pipe. More guerrillas emerged from the undergrowth to take charge of the dead pigs.

Roast pork and a ten-mile stretch of road shot to hell and gone made for a celebration that evening. So did a couple of jugs of raw corn whiskey. The stuff tasted like paint thinner and burned its way down like a lighted kerosene lamp. After a few swallows, Moss started forgetting things. A few more, he knew, and he’d have trouble remembering his name.

But he needed to remember something. “You’ve got to tell people,” he said to Spartacus, the homemade hooch adding urgency to his voice.

“Tell which people?” the guerrilla leader asked. “Tell ’em what?” He was drinking harder than Moss.

“Got to tell the other colored fighters.” Moss was proud of himself. He did remember! “Got to tell them what these pickup trucks can do.”

“Don’t you worry none about dat,” Spartacus said. “Be all over Georgia day after tomorrow. Be all the way to Louisiana this time nex’ week. Yes, suh. You best believe it will. We done hit the ofays hard. Folks is gonna hear about it. You best believe folks is gonna hear about it.”

Moss turned to Nick Cantarella. “You’re a hero.”

“My ass,” Cantarella said. “I didn’t even get to drive the truck.” But he hadn’t drunk himself fighting mad, for he went on, “What I really like about this is that their own damn propaganda upped and bit ’em. I never woulda thought of mounting a machine gun on a pickup and raising hell. But since those stupid pricks went and told me how-”

“Here’s to propaganda,” Moss said. They both drank.

Colonel Terry DeFrancis was one of the youngest officers of his rank Major General Abner Dowling had ever seen. Remembering how long he’d taken to get to bird colonel himself, Dowling eyed the boy wonder with suspicion.

“My orders from the War Department are to subordinate myself to you and to smash C.S. air power in west Texas,” DeFrancis said. “I think my wing has brought enough fighters and bombers out here to do the job, too.”

“I wouldn’t begin to argue with you there, Colonel,” Dowling said. In one fell swoop, the air power at his command had tripled. “But why does Philadelphia care now when it didn’t before?”

“Sir, I can answer that in three little words,” DeFrancis told him.

“If you’re going to say, I love you, Colonel, I’ll throw you out on your ear,” Dowling warned, straight-faced.

Terry DeFrancis stared at him, then laughed like a loon. “You’re not what I expected, sir, not even slightly,” he said. “No, what I was going to say is, I don’t know. Have Featherston’s boys been pulling off air raids that hurt?”

“If they have, nobody told me about it,” Dowling answered. “They haven’t had enough airplanes out here to hurt us very badly. We haven’t had enough to do much to them, either. Sounds like things are going to change, though.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” Colonel DeFrancis agreed. “That’s what my boys are here for. We’re going to make them sorry if we can.”

“Good,” Dowling said. It was good in all kinds of ways. If the War Department had aircraft to spare for an out-of-the-way outfit like his Eleventh Army, it was bound to have even more farther east, where the real decision would lie. And…“Tell me something, Colonel: when they sent you out here, did they say anything about Camp Determination?”

“No, sir,” the younger man answered. “Is that ours or theirs? Sounds like something the Freedom Party would name.”

“There’s a reason for that-it is something the Freedom Party named. Here. Take a look at these.” Dowling’s desk had a locked drawer. He unlocked it and took out the aerial reconnaissance photos of the camp near Snyder…and of the mass graves not far away.

DeFrancis studied them with meticulous care. He was frowning as he looked up at Dowling. “Interpreting stuff like this isn’t always easy, especially when you’re seeing it for the first time. What exactly am I looking at here?” Dowling told him exactly what he was looking at there. DeFrancis’ jaw dropped. “You’re making that up…uh, sir.”

“Colonel, I wish to Christ I were,” Dowling answered, and the disgust and horror in his voice had to carry conviction. “It’s the truth, though. If anything, it’s an understatement. They really are killing off their Negroes, and they really are doing it by carload lots. Literally by carload lots-that’s a railroad spur between the two halves of the camp.”

“Yes, sir. I saw that it was.” Colonel DeFrancis stared down at the pictures again. When he looked up this time, he wasn’t just frowning. He was slightly green, or more than slightly. “You know, I thought all those stories were bullshit. Propaganda. Stuff we pumped out to keep the civilians all hot and bothered about the war effort. Back in the last war, the British said the Germans boiled babies’ bodies to make soap. That kind of thing.”

“I felt the same way till I got out here,” Dowling said grimly. “Who wouldn’t? If you’re halfway decent yourself, you figure the guy on the other side is, too. Well, the guy on the other side here is Jake Featherston, and Jake Featherston really is just as big a son of a bitch as everybody always thought he was.”

DeFrancis eyed the photographs once more. Dowling understood that. They had an evil fascination to them. In their own way, they were just as much filthy pictures as the ones you could buy in any town where soldiers or sailors got leave. “What can we do about this, sir?” DeFrancis asked. “We can’t just let it go on. I mean, I haven’t got any great use for niggers, but…”

“Yeah. But.” Dowling reached into another desk drawer. He pulled out a half-pint of whiskey and slid it across the desk to the younger man. “Here. Wash the taste out of your mouth.”

“Thank you, sir.” DeFrancis took a healthy swig, then set the flat bottle down. “What can we do? We’ve got to do something.”

“I think so, too, though you’d be amazed at how many people on our side of the border don’t give a rat’s ass,” Dowling said. “I’ve had the time to think about it now. Way it looks to me is, we can’t just bomb hell out of the camp. If we do that, we go into the nigger-killing business ourselves. Like you said, I don’t have much use for them, but I don’t want to do that.”

“I agree,” DeFrancis said. “Like I told you, sir, my first priority is blasting enemy airstrips and aircraft, but now I see what I do next.”

Dowling scratched his head. The War Department suddenly seemed to have a wild hair about C.S. airstrips here in the West. Had the latest raids on Los Angeles and Las Vegas and Denver rattled people back East so much? If they had, why? Dowling shrugged. That wasn’t his worry-and, as often as not, the ways of the gods back in Philadelphia were unfathomable to mere mortals in the field.

“I haven’t operated out here before,” Colonel DeFrancis said. “What’s the fuel situation like?”

“We don’t have a problem there,” Dowling said. “The refineries in Southern California are working with local crude, so they’re at full capacity. We get what we need. A lot of the airplane plants are out there, too, so you should be able to get your hands on spare parts.”

“Assuming they don’t decide to send all of them-and all the avgas-to Ohio and Virginia,” DeFrancis said.

“Yes, assuming,” Dowling agreed. “We can’t do much about that, so there isn’t much point to worrying about it, is there?”

“No, sir.” The young officer eyed him. “I think we’re going to get on pretty well, sir.” He might have been announcing a miracle.

“Well, here’s hoping,” Dowling said. “I put up with General Custer for a lot of years. My thought is, if I managed that, most people ought to be able to stand me for a while.”

“Er-yes, sir.” Colonel DeFrancis gave him an odd look now. To DeFrancis, as to most people, George Armstrong Custer was a hero up on a marble column. He wasn’t a whiskey-drinking, cigar-smoking, skirt-chasing (whenever his wife wasn’t too close), evil-tempered, mule-stubborn old man. Reminding people that a hero had feet of clay (and sometimes a head of iron) seldom won you friends.

No matter what DeFrancis thought about General Custer, he knew what to do with airplanes. He built his strips close to the front, relying on the Eleventh Army not to lose ground and leave them vulnerable to artillery fire. Dowling thought he could oblige the flier there. But he was gloomily certain the Confederates would find out where the new fields were as soon as the bulldozers and steamrollers started leveling ground. No matter whether you called this part of the world west Texas or part of a revived U.S. state of Houston, the people here remained passionately pro-Confederate. And the land was so wide and troops scattered so thinly, those people had no trouble slipping across the front to tell the enemy what they knew.

Or rather, what they thought they knew. Terry DeFrancis proved devious to a downright byzantine degree. Earth-moving equipment laid out and flattened several dummy fields along with the ones his airplanes would actually use. Confederate bombers called on more of the dummies than the real airstrips, wasting their high-explosive sweetness on the desert ground.

And then DeFrancis’ medium and heavy bombers roared off to respond. Dowling drove back to one of the strips-irreverently named Fry Featherston Field-to watch them go. They and their escort fighters kicked up ungodly clouds of dust. Coughing, Dowling said, “We’ve got our own smoke screen.”

“Yes, sir,” DeFrancis shouted over the engines’ thunder. “We could use one, too. I’m not used to operating in broad daylight. It’s a different war out here. New rules.”

“No, Colonel.” Dowling shook his head. “Only one rule, the same one you find anywhere. We’ve got to beat those bastards.”

DeFrancis pondered that, but not for long. “We’ll do it, sir. We’ll beat ’em like a drum.”

He kept fighters in the air when the bombers came back for fuel and ordnance. A few bombers-and a few fighters-didn’t come back. The Confederates had fighters of their own, and antiaircraft around their airfields. You couldn’t fight a war without taking losses. Colonel DeFrancis looked grim. The men who went down weren’t just fliers to him. They were friends, almost family.

Wireless technicians monitored signals from the U.S. airplanes, and also from the Confederates. They marked maps and brought them to DeFrancis and Dowling. “Looks like we’re doing pretty good, sir,” one of them said.

“We’re plastering the fields we know about, all right,” DeFrancis said.

“How many fields have they got that we don’t know about?” Dowling asked.

“That’s always the question,” DeFrancis said. “We’ll find out how hard they hit back, and from where. Then we’ll go blast hell out of those places, too. Sooner or later, they won’t be able to stand the gaff any more.”

He sounded confident. Dowling looked inside himself-and found he was confident, too. Enemy bombers returned, but at night: the Confederates had paid too high a price to go on with day bombing. That was a sign they were hurting, or Dowling hoped it was. Night bombing spared their airplanes, but wasn’t very accurate.

The Confederates managed to sneak auto bombs onto a couple of fields. They blew up one bomber in its revetment and cratered another runway. The runway was easy enough to repair; the bomber was a write-off. Terry DeFrancis cashiered the officers in charge of security at those strips.

When Dowling heard about the auto bombs, he telephoned and asked what the wing commander had done about them. When he found out, he grunted in sour satisfaction. “If you didn’t give ’em the boot, I would have,” he said.

“Figured as much, sir,” DeFrancis said. “But I can shoot my own dog, by God. And I shot both those sons of bitches. They had no business falling asleep at the switch. This isn’t Nebraska, for God’s sake. Enemy action shouldn’t catch them playing with themselves.”

“In two words, Colonel, you’re right.” Dowling hung up feeling better about the world than he had in quite a while. DeFrancis was an officer after his own heart.

On the ground, the Eleventh Army wasn’t making much progress. Dowling used what he had as aggressively as he could. He’d already made the Confederates send that elite unit to stall his advance. The Party Guards did it, too. He was disappointed about that, but not crushed. Whatever the Freedom Party Guards did here, they weren’t doing in Ohio or Kentucky or Virginia, places that really mattered.

He wondered if the Confederates would send more bombers west to contest the skies with Terry DeFrancis’ airplanes. They didn’t. Their counterattacks dwindled. Before long, they were reduced to harassment raids from biplanes that sounded like flying sewing machines-Boll Weevils, the Confederates called them. They came straight out of the Great War: their pilots heaved five- and ten-pound bombs from the cockpit by hand.

That sounded laughable, till the first time one of those little bombs blew up an officers’ club. The Boll Weevils flew at what would have been treetop height if there were any trees close by. Y-ranging had a devil of a time spotting them, and nothing else could, not till they got right on top of whatever they intended to hit.

They would never win the war for the CSA. Even so, they kept Dowling and DeFrancis back on their heels. U.S. air power had won part of the fight here in west Texas, but not all of it. Abner Dowling fumed in Lubbock. Nothing ever went quite the way you wished it would.