Walk in Hell

VIII

Roger Kimball stood up on the conning tower of the Bonefish. He looked around. All he saw were the cool, gray waters of the North Atlantic. All he smelled was clean salt air-none of the rotting stinks of the South Carolina swamps. He sucked in a long, deep breath and let it out like a connoisseur savoring a fine wine.

His executive officer smiled. “Feels good to be back at sea, doesn’t it, sir?” Junior Lieutenant Brearley said.

“Feels better than good, Tom,” Kimball answered. “We’re doing our proper job again, and about time, too. If I’d wanted to be a policeman and wear a funny hat, I’d have joined the police in the first place.”

A wave crashed against the Bonefish’s bow. The conning tower and the hatch leading down into the submersible were protected by canvas shields-or so claimed the men who’d designed the shields. Kimball supposed they were better than nothing. They didn’t keep him and Brearley from getting seawater in the face. They didn’t keep more seawater from puddling under their feet or from dripping down the hatch.

Brearley used a sleeve to wipe himself more or less dry. His smile now was rueful. “Harder to keep the boat dry than it was on the river.”

“Price you pay for doing the proper job,” Kimball said airily. He could afford to be airy now, up here. When he went below, the diesel-oil and other stenches inside the Bonefish-all produced despite everything the crew could do-would easily surpass those of the swamps flanking the Pee Dee.

Since that couldn’t be helped, he put it out of his mind. Wiping the lenses of his field glasses with a pocket handkerchief, he raised the glasses to his eyes and scanned the horizon for a telltale plume of smoke that would mark a ship. The wind quickly whipped away the exhaust from the Bonefish’s diesel. Bigger vessels, though, burned coal or fuel oil, and left more prominent signatures in the air.

He spied nothing. The Bonefish might have been alone in the Atlantic. He didn’t like that. Letting the binoculars thump down against his chest on their leather strap, he pounded on the conning tower rail with his fist. “Damn it, Tom, they’re supposed to be out here.”

“Yes, sir,” the exec said. That was all he could say. Intelligence had reported the U.S. Navy was gathering for a push against the British and French warships protecting their home countries’ merchant vessels. Sending one or two of those Yankee ships to the bottom would make life easier for the Entente powers against the twin colossi of the USA and Germany.

As if picking the thought from his mind, Brearley said, “We have managed to keep the damnyankees and the Huns from joining hands.”

“We’d better go right on keeping ’em from doing that, too, sonny, or you can kiss this war good-bye,” Kimball answered dryly. “We’ve got to keep the trade route from Argentina to French West Africa open, too, or England starts starving even worse than she is already. And we’ve got to keep the route from England to Canada at least partway open, or else the USA sits on Canada like an elephant squashing a mouse. If we manage to do all of that, the soldiers can go on doing what they’re supposed to do.”

“Have we got enough ships?” Brearley asked. “Have all of us together-us and the British and the French and the Russians and whatever the Canadians have left-have we got enough ships to do everything we have to do?”

Kimball clapped him on the back. “We’ve done it so far-just barely. Reckon we can keep on doing it-just barely. And don’t forget the Japanese. They’re giving England and Canada quite a hand in the Pacific, by everything I hear.”

“Don’t know as how I really care for them fooling around in a white man’s war,” Brearley said, “but I suppose we have to grab the help now and be thankful for it, and then worry later about sorting out what it means.”

“That’s how it works,” Kimball agreed. As soon as he’d spoken, though, he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. Brearley was all for cutting a deal with the Negroes, too, and then sorting out what that all meant later.

Had his exec set him up, so he would notice he was arguing one way on one of the questions and the other way on the other? He let his eyes slide toward Tom Brearley. Sure as hell, the young pup looked ever so slightly smug. But Brearley had too much sense to say anything, so Kimball couldn’t gig him for it. This round went to the junior lieutenant.

So Kimball wouldn’t have to admit as much, he raised the field glasses once more to scan the horizon. He did not do it expecting to spot anything: more to give him an excuse not to answer, and to change the subject when he did speak again. But there, off to the northeast, rose an unmistakable plume of smoke.

He stiffened and thrust out an index finger, as if he were a bird dog coming to the point. Tom Brearley didn’t have field glasses of his own. Before the war, most of them had been made in Germany, and they remained in short supply throughout the Entente powers. But, after a minute or so, Brearley nodded. “Yes, sir. I see it, too.”

Kimball called down to the petty officer at the wheel: “Change course to 045.”

“Oh-four-five, aye aye, sir,” Ben Coulter answered. His voice caught with excitement as he sent a question up the hatchway: “You spotted something, sir?”

“Something, yes,” Kimball answered: submersible officers and crew paid less attention to the minutiae of military formality than any other part of the C.S. Navy. “Don’t know what yet.”

He peered through the field glasses again. A swell lifted the Bonefish, extending the horizon for him. He got a glimpse of the hull producing the smoke. “That’s a Yankee destroyer, sure as hell it is. Now the fun begins.” His lips curled back from his teeth in what was more nearly snarl than smile.

He started calculating at a furious clip. A destroyer could run away from his submersible even when he was surfaced, or could attack him with bigger guns than he carried. Submerged, the Bonefish made only nine knots going flat out-a pace that would quickly exhaust her batteries and force her to the surface again. He couldn’t pursue the U.S. ship, then. He had to see if he could place the submarine in her path and lie in wait for her. If not, he’d have to let her escape. If so…

“Let’s go below, Tom,” Kimball said. His exec nodded and dove down the hatch. Kimball followed, dogging it shut after him. He bawled an order to the crew: “Prepare to dive-periscope depth!”

Klaxons hooted. Tanks made bubbling, popping noises as water flooded into them. The Bonefish slid under the water in-“Thirty-eight seconds, I make it,” Brearley said, an eye to his pocket watch. Kimball grunted. That was acceptable but something less than wonderful.

He raised the periscope. “Hope the damn thing isn’t too misted up to see through,” he muttered. The odds were about even. He grunted again, this time appreciatively. The view was, if not perfectly clear, clear enough.

He turned the periscope in the direction of the destroyer he’d spotted. The fellow hadn’t altered course, which Kimball devoutly hoped meant he hadn’t a clue the Bonefish was anywhere about. He was, unless Kimball had botched his solution, making about twenty knots, and about two miles away.

“Give me course 090,” Kimball told the helmsman, and then spoke to the rest of the crew: “Ready the torpedoes in the two forward tubes.”

The Bonefish crept east. The U.S. destroyer was doing most of the work, coming right across his bow, leaving itself wide open for a shot-if it didn’t pick up speed and steam past the submersible before the latter was in position to launch its deadly fish.

“I want to get inside twelve hundred yards before I turn ’em loose,” Kimball remarked, more as if thinking out loud than talking to Tom Brearley. “I’ll shoot from a mile if I have to, though, and trust to luck that I’m not carrying any moldies.”

“Yes, sir,” Brearley agreed; duds were the bane-and often the end-of a submariner’s existence. The executive officer went on, “Are you sure you want to shoot from such long range, sir? A miss will bring the U.S. fleet after us full bore.”

“Just because they’re after us doesn’t mean they’ll catch us,” Kimball said smugly. “So yes, I’ll take the chance, thanks.” He grinned. “After all, if I sink that destroyer, that’ll bring the U.S. fleet after us, too.”

“Yes, sir.” Brearley sounded as if he was smiling, too; Kimball didn’t look away from the periscope to see. A good kid, he thought absently. A little on the soft side, but a good kid.

And here came the destroyer, fat and sassy. He’d have lookouts peering in all directions for periscopes, but some of those fools would have seen enough periscopes that weren’t there to make officers leery of taking their reports too seriously. They wouldn’t be expecting Confederate company quite so far out to sea, either; the Bonefish was well past her normal cruising radius. But she’d picked up fuel from a freighter not long before, and so…“We’ll give you damnyankees a surprise,” Kimball muttered.

He wasn’t going to get a shot off at twelve hundred yards. The electric engines were too puny to get him close enough fast enough. But he would be inside a mile. Any time you could split the difference between what you really wanted and what you’d settle for, you weren’t doing too bad.

“Depth?” he asked quietly.

“Thirty-five feet, sir,” Brearley answered after checking the gauge.

“Give me a couple more degrees south, Coulter,” Kimball said. “A little more…steady…Fire number one!” Fearsome clangs and hissings marked the launch of the first torpedo. A moment later, Kimball shouted, “Fire number two!”

He studied both tracks with grave intensity. They looked straight, they looked good. The destroyer had less than a minute to react, and momentum that kept her from reacting fast. She started to turn toward the Bonefish, presenting the smallest area for the fish to reach.

Kimball couldn’t tell whether the first torpedo passed under her bow or hit and failed to explode. He hadn’t snarled more than a couple of curses, though, when the second one caught her just aft of amidships. “Hit!” he screamed. “Hell of a hit! She’ll go down from that, damn me to hell if she don’t.” The destroyer lay dead in the water, and bent at an unnatural angle. She was already starting to list. Some of the Yankees aboard would make her boats, Kimball thought, but some wouldn’t, too.

Rebel yells ripped through the narrow steel tube in which the Bonefish’s crew lived and worked. The men pounded one another on the back. “Score one for the captain!” Ben Coulter whooped. Everybody pounded Kimball on the back, too, something unthinkable in the surface Navy.

“Give me course 315,” Kimball told the helmsman. Heading obliquely away from the path of the torpedoes was a good way not to have your tracks followed. “Half speed.” He’d have mercy on the batteries.

After an hour, he surfaced to recharge them. Foul, pressurized air rushed out of the Bonefish when he undogged the hatch. All the stinks seemed worse, somehow, right at that moment. He went up onto the conning tower. To his relief, now, he spied no smoke plumes on the horizon.

“Good shooting, sir,” Tom Brearley said, coming up behind him.

“Thanks,” Kimball said. “That’s what they pay me for. And speaking of pay, we just made the damnyankees pay plenty. We done licked ’em twice. They’re stupid enough to think we can’t do it three times running, no matter what our niggers try doin’, they can damn well think again.”

“Yes, sir!” Brearley said.

“Snow in my face in April!” Major Irving Morrell said enthusiastically. “This, by God, this is the life.”

“Yes, sir.” Captain Charlie Hall had rather less joy in his voice. “Snow in your face about eight months a year hereabouts.” The snow blowing in his face and Morrell’s obscured the Canadian Rockies for the moment. Morrell didn’t mind. He’d seen them when the weather was better. They were even grander than they were in the USA. They were even snowier than they were in the USA, too, and that was saying something.

“I hope you don’t mind my telling you this,” Morrell said to Hall, “but I think you’ve been going at this the wrong way. Charge straight at the damn Canucks, and they’ll slaughter you. You’ve seen that.”

Hall’s face twisted. He was a big, bluff, blond man, bronzed by sun, chapped by wind, with a Kaiser Bill mustache he kept waxed and impeccable regardless of the weather. He said, “It’s true, sir. I can’t deny it. We sent divisions into Crow’s Nest Pass and came out with regiments. The Canucks didn’t want to give up for hell.”

“And they were waiting for us to do what we did, too,” Morrell said. “Give the enemy what he’s waiting for and you’ll be sorry a hundred times out of a hundred. The Canucks made us pay and pay, and what did we have when we were done paying? Less than we’d hoped. They just stopped running trains through Crow’s Nest Pass and doubled up in Kicking Horse Pass.”

He pointed ahead. U.S. forces had been slogging toward Kicking Horse Pass for the past year and a half. He didn’t intend to slog any more. He was going to move, and to make the Canadians move, too.

“And when we finally take this one, they’ll go on up to Yellow-head Pass,” Hall said. “This war is a slower business than anyone dreamt when we first started fighting.”

“If we drive enough nails into their coffin, eventually they won’t be able to pull the lid up any more,” Morrell said.

“I like that.” Hall’s face was better suited for the grin it wore now than for its earlier grimace. A couple of Morrell’s other company commanders joined them then: Captain Karl Spadinger, who for looks could have been Charlie Hall’s cousin; and First Lieutenant Jephtha Lewis, who would have seemed more at home behind a plow on the Great Plains than in the Rockies of Alberta. With them came Sergeant Saul Finkel, who had a dark, quiet face and the long, thin-fingered hands of a watchmaker-which he had been before joining the Army.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Morrell said, pointing to the Canadian position ahead of them and then to the map he took from a pouch on his belt. The view was better on the map; the snow didn’t obscure it. “We’ve got this fortified hill ahead of us. I will lead the detachment advancing to the west. Sergeant Finkel!”

“Sir!” the sergeant said.

“You and one machine-gun squad from Lieutenant Lewis’ company will cover the ridge road up there”-he showed what he had in mind both through the blowing snow and on the map-“and block the Canadians from coming down and getting in our rear. I rely on you for this, Sergeant. If I had to make do with anyone else, I’d leave two guns behind. But your weapon always works.”

“It will keep working, sir,” Finkel said. Morrell looked at his hands again. Anyone who could handle the tiny, intricate gearing of watches was unlikely to have trouble keeping a machine gun operating, and Finkel, along with being mechanically ept, was also a brave, cool-headed soldier.

Morrell pointed to Captain Spadinger. “Karl, you’ll take the rest of your company and open the hostile position on the eastern side of the slope. Hold your fire as long as you can.”

“Yes, sir,” Spadinger said. “As you ordered, we’ll be carrying extra grenades for when actual combat breaks out.”

“Good,” Morrell said. Spadinger’s efficiency pleased him, which was why he’d given him the secondary command for the attack. He went on, “Captain Hall, your rifle company and Lieutenant Lewis’ machine-gun company, less that one squad I’m leaving with Sergeant Finkel, will accompany me on the main flanking thrust. If we can chase the Canucks off this hill, we’ve gone a long way toward clearing the path to Banff. Any questions, gentlemen?” Nobody said anything. Morrell nodded. “We’ll try it, then. We advance as rapidly as possible. Keep speed in your minds above all else. We move at 0900.”

In the fifteen minutes before they began to move, he checked his men, especially the teams manhandling the machine guns across country. They were good troops; in grim Darwinian fashion, most of the soldiers who didn’t make good mountain troops were dead or wounded by now.

He felt the men’s eyes on him, too. This would be the first real action they’d faced with him commanding them. He didn’t suppose they knew about his having had to leave the General Staff-he hoped they didn’t, anyhow-but they had to be wondering about what he and they would be able to do together. Well, they were finding out he didn’t care to huddle in trenches.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Spruce and fir and swirling snow helped screen the men in green-gray from the Canadians above. No firing broke out off to the right, which relieved Morrell to no small degree. He grinned, imagining Spadinger’s men rounding up sentries and poking bayoneted rifles into dugouts, catching the Canucks by surprise.

His own men scooped up a fair number of prisoners, too. One of them, brought back to Morrell, glared at him and said, “What the devil are you bastards doing so far from where the fighting is?”

“Why, moving it someplace else, of course,” he answered cheerfully, which made the Canuck even less happy.

Morrell’s leg tried to protest when he pushed up to the very head of his force, but he ignored it. It’s only pain, he told himself, and, as he usually did, managed to make himself believe it. He reached the lead just in time to help capture a machine-gun position the Canadians had blasted out of the living rock of the hill, again without firing a shot.

“This is wonderful, sir!” Captain Hall exclaimed. “We’ve got the drop on the Canucks for sure this time.”

“So far, so-” Morrell began. Before good got out of his mouth, a burst of fire made him whip his head back toward the direction which Captain Spadinger and his company had gone. It sounded as if they were heavily engaged. “We appear to have lost the advantage of-” Morrell didn’t get to finish that sentence, either. Machine guns from atop the hill opened up on his detachment before he could say surprise. That was a surprise to him, and not a pleasant one.

“Dig in!” he shouted. “Do it now! Sweat saves blood!” As the riflemen began to obey, he turned to Lieutenant Lewis. “Get those machine guns set up. We’ve got to neutralize that fire.”

The machine-gun crews mounted their heavy weapons on top of the even heavier tripods in time that would have kept a drill sergeant happy on the practice field. It wasn’t for prestige here; it was for survival.

Morrell cursed as one of his men slumped over, briefly kicking in a way suggesting he’d never get up again. “Advance on them!” he yelled. “Shift to the northeast, so we can take that hilltop and support Captain Spadinger’s company. Move, move, move!”

It wasn’t the fight he’d wanted, but it was the fight he had. Now he had to make the best of it. Keeping everything as fluid as possible would also keep the Canucks confused about how many men he had and what he intended to do with them. Since he suspected he was outnumbered, that was all to the good.

Back where this movement had originated, Sergeant Finkel’s machine gun started hammering. Morrell nodded to himself. The Canucks wouldn’t be getting into his rear. Now he had to see if he could get into theirs. “Hold fire as much as you can as you advance,” he called to the riflemen. “Let them think Spadinger has the main force. If they concentrate on him, we’ll make them regret it.”

“Aren’t you telling the men more than they need to know?” Captain Hall shouted as the two of them ran to a boulder and flopped down behind it side by side. Bullets whined away from the other side of the stone, then went elsewhere in search of fresh targets.

“Just the opposite, Captain,” Morrell answered. “This way, if I go down, the attack will go forward, because they’ll know what I expect of them.” Hall didn’t look convinced, but he didn’t argue with his commanding officer, either. If Morrell’s methods didn’t work, odds were he’d end up dead and so beyond criticism. Morrell raised his voice: “Keep the machine guns well forward, Lieutenant Lewis!”

Lewis and his machine gunners, bless their hearts, didn’t need that order. They treated the machine guns almost like rifles, advancing at a stumbling run from one patch of cover to the next they saw-or hoped they saw.

Even so, Morrell was worried, and worse than worried. From the sound of the fighting off to the east, Spadinger’s men weren’t withholding fire. On the contrary; it sounded as if every man was in the line, fighting desperately to stay alive. If the forces they’d run into could crush them, those forces would swing back on him and smash him up, too. “Hold on, Karl!” he whispered fiercely. “Make them pay the price.”

One of the Canuck machine guns up at the crest of the hill fell silent. Morrell whooped as he ran forward. The Canadians were used to facing slow, carefully set up attacks, not to this sort of lightning strike with things hitting them all at once from every which way.

And then he whooped again, for men in khaki scrambled out of their trenches and ran down-to the southeast, toward Captain Spadinger’s embattled company. They gave Morrell’s men the kind of target soldiers dreamt about. “Now!” he shouted. “Give ’em everything we’ve got.”

Again, the men did not need the order. They loosed a storm of lead at the Canadians, who shouted in dismay at taking such fire from the right flank and rear. Yelling with glee, the U.S. soldiers dashed forward to take out the foes giving their comrades so much trouble.

Half an hour later, Morrell stood on the height he’d intended to bypass. A long file of dejected prisoners, many of them roughly bandaged, stumbled back toward what had been the U.S. line. “You don’t fight fair,” one of them shouted to Morrell.

“Good,” Morrell answered. The Canuck scowled. His own men laughed. They felt like tigers now. For that matter, he felt on the tigerish side himself. Things hadn’t gone exactly as he’d thought they would, but they seldom did. One thing both real war and the General Staff had taught him was that no plan long survived contact with the enemy.

He looked around. The view was terrific. He’d taken the objective. He hadn’t taken crippling casualties doing it. How he’d taken it didn’t matter. That he’d taken it did. He looked around again. A new question burned in his mind-what could he do next?

Jefferson Pinkard looked down at himself. His butternut uniform was so full of stains from the red dirt of southern Georgia, it might as well have started out mottled. He smelled. By the way his head itched, he probably had lice. Emily would have thrown him in a kettle, boiled him, and shampooed him with kerosene before she let him into the house, let alone into her bed.

He didn’t care. He was alive. He’d seen too many different kinds of horrible death these past few weeks-he’d dealt out too many different kinds of horrible death these past few weeks-to worry about anything past that. The Black Belt Socialist Republic was dying. When he’d set out, he’d supposed that would make everything worthwhile. Did it? He didn’t know. He didn’t care much, either.

He detached the bayonet from his Tredegar and methodically cleaned it. It was clean already, but he wanted it cleaner. It had had blood on it, a couple of days before. He couldn’t see that blood, not now, but he knew it was there.

“Damn niggers ought to give up,” he muttered under his breath.

“What you say?” That was Hip Rodriguez, a recruit from down in Sonora. He didn’t speak a whole lot of English. Most of what he did speak was vile. Up till the Conscription Bureau nabbed Jeff Pinkard, he’d thought of Sonorans and Chihuahuans as one step above Negroes, and a short step to boot. But Rodriguez had saved his life. If that didn’t make him a good fellow, nothing ever would.

And so, instead of barking, Jeff repeated himself, adding, “They’re licked. They damn well ought to know it.”

Rodriguez shrugged. “We keep licking they, they quit-one way or t’odder.” He carried a thoroughly nonregulation knife on his belt, and a whetstone to go with it. When he honed that blade, it made a vicious little grinding sound. He smiled, enjoying it.

“That’s true,” Pinkard admitted. “No two ways around it, I guess. Question that keeps comin’up in my mind, though, is what happens afterwards. They gonna be pullin’ knives like yours out o’ their hip pockets and stabbin’ white men twenty years from now when they think they got the chance? That’s a hell of a way to try and run a country, you know what I’m sayin’?”

Rodriguez shrugged again. “They try that, they get killed. Is no big never-mind to me.” He flashed a big, shiny grin at Jeff. “In Sonora, we don’t have no mallates-no niggers-till you Confederates, you buy us from Mexico. You bring in the problem. You should ought to fix it, too.”

With some amusement, Pinkard noted that Rodriguez looked down his nose at Negroes, too. In a way, it made sense: if not for them, he would have been on the bottom himself. But the blacks were on the bottom. That made putting them down harder, because they had so little to lose from their rebellion.

Off to one side, a field piece began barking, throwing shells into Albany, Georgia. Captain Connolly looked up from his tin cup of coffee and said, “All right, boys, now we go and take their capital away from ’em. About time, I’d say. And doing that’ll just about put the last nail in the coffin. Can’t hardly claim they’ve got a country when they haven’t got a capital any more, can they?”

“Damnyankees do,” Stinky Salley said.

Connolly didn’t catch him opening his mouth. He looked around. “All right, who’s the smart bird?” he demanded. Nobody said anything. He gulped down the rest of the coffee-heavily laced with chicory and God only knew what all else, if it was anything like Jeff’s. Pinkard didn’t care. It was hot and strong and made his heart beat faster. The captain said, “Come on, boys. Time to do it.”

He didn’t tell them what to do and sit back on his duff. He went out with them and helped them do it. Pinkard had appreciated that in a foundry foreman. He appreciated it even more in an officer. After patting himself to make sure he had plenty of spare clips for the Tredegar, he scrambled to his feet and trudged on toward Albany.

The front hereabouts was too wide, with too few men covering too many miles, for proper entrenchment. You dug foxholes where you happened to be, fought out of them, and advanced some more. The survivors of the new regiment to which he belonged weren’t advancing in neat files of men now. They’d learned better. They moved forward in open order, well spread out. More space for the bullets to pass between, Pinkard thought.

A shot rang out-behind him. One of his comrades went down, clutching at the back of his left thigh. Half a dozen men close by went down, too, hitting the dirt at the first sound of gunfire. Pinkard was one of them. He’d developed a tremendous respect for the horrid things flying lead could do to the human body.

Another shot kicked up red dirt and spat it in his face. “It’s another one of those hideout sons of bitches,” he said unhappily. As their strength faltered, the Reds had formed the nasty habit of digging in with concealed foxholes facing not toward their Confederate foes but away, and holding their fire till the soldiers had gone past them. They’d done considerable damage that way. This fellow looked to have added to it.

Stalking him through the pine woods was a deadly game of hide and seek. He wounded another man before Rodriguez flushed him out of his hole with a grenade and three other soldiers shot him from three different directions. He wasn’t quite dead, even after that. Jeff put a round through his head at close range, which made him stop thrashing and moaning.

“What did you go and do that for?” one of the other Confederates asked. “Bastard deserved to suffer, I reckon.”

“Yeah, but if we went and left him, he might have found a way to do more mischief, even shot up like he was,” Pinkard answered.

“Oh, tactics. That’s all right, then,” said the other soldier, a hulking Tennessean named Finley. “You talk kind of soft on niggers sometimes, so I wondered if you was just doing him a kindness.”

Pinkard bristled. He wasn’t a hardliner, and nobody could make him one-he was a free white man, with a right to his opinion. “Listen,” he said, “there’s ten million of ’em in the CSA, or ten million take away however many got themselves killed in this stupid uprising of theirs. We got to figure out what to do with ’em after this part of the shooting’s done.”

“Put the slave chains back on ’em,” Finley snapped. “Serve ’em right.”

Not many Confederates wanted to go that far, for which Pinkard thanked God. “They done showed they can fight,” he said. “You buy a big buck nigger now, Finley, you think you ever dare turn your back on him?” Finley scowled from under the brim of his helmet. He didn’t say anything, which suited Jeff fine.

They emerged from the woods a few hundred yards outside of Albany. Field pieces were still pounding the town. Answering fire came mostly from the big houses on the north side of the main street: from what had been the white section of the city. Red flags still flew defiantly above several of those houses. “Bastards are doing it on purpose, hurting whites as much as they can,” Finley said. Now Pinkard was the one who didn’t answer.

One of those big houses with a two-story colonnaded porch held a machine gun. It spat death out toward the advancing soldiers in butternut. The fields had been plowed with shell holes. Pinkard jumped into one. Once he was in it, he discovered he shared it with the stinking corpse of a Negro. He stayed where he was, stench or no stench. With bullets whining past overhead, he figured he’d wind up a corpse himself if he moved too soon.

But, however much you might like the notion, you couldn’t huddle in a hole forever. When the machine gun chose a different target, he got up and ran for another hole closer to Albany. He got fired on again, but made it safely.

The Confederates were moving on the city from the west and the north. The Red rebels holed up inside did not have the firepower to keep them out. But instead of fading back into the countryside, the Negroes fought house to house, making the government forces clear them out with grenades and, once or twice, with the bayonet.

At last, the Reds were pushed back to the last couple of houses where they still had machine guns up and firing. A flag still flew from one of them. Inside, the Negroes shouted the defiant cry they’d raised through the whole unpleasant engagement: “The people! Fo’ the people!”

When gunfire eased for a moment, Pinkard shouted back: “Give up, you lying bastards! We are the people!”

“Liar your own self!” One of those machine guns lashed the rubble in which he lay. He’d expected that, and stayed very low behind the big pile of red bricks that had been a chimney before a shell knocked it down. But his words seemed to have angered the black rebels so much, they didn’t just want to kill him. The same fellow who’d yelled before shouted out again: “You ain’t the people. You is the dogs o’ the aristocracy, is what you is!” He barked derisively.

“The hell you say!” Pinkard answered, a measure of how good his cover was. “Lot more white men than niggers in the CSA.”

“Not in the Black Belt Socialist Republic,” the Red retorted. “Not in the others, neither.” He laughed. “We havin’ our own War o’ Secession, if’n you want to put it like that.”

Jeff didn’t want to put it like that, even to himself. It would have made the fight the Negroes were raising seem altogether too legitimate to him. And then another Red let out a dark, nasty laugh and added, “Sure as hell ain’t mo’ white folks than niggers in the Black Belt Socialist Republic nowadays. We done took care o’ that.”

From off to the side, a Confederate soldier started pitching grenades into the house where the Red revolutionaries were holed up. Pinkard had no idea whether they wounded any of the Negroes. They did set the house on fire.

That left the Reds a desperate choice. They could stay and burn or flee and get shot down. They fled, disciplined enough to carry the machine gun with them to set up again if they found fresh refuge. They didn’t.

One more house and the fighting was done. Captain Connolly carried a red flag as he strode through the shattered wreckage of what had been a prosperous Georgia farming town. “It’s over,” he said. “Here, it’s over.”

Pinkard looked around. He felt giddy, half stunned, half drunk at being alive. Wearily, he shook his head. The fighting might have ended, but the revolt and its aftermath weren’t over. He wondered how many years would pass before they were. He wondered if they ever would be.

Remembrance Day passed quietly in New York City. Soldiers’ Circle men and military bands paraded, as did newly raised units going off to the front. Enough soldiers with glittering bayonets and full clips in their rifles stood along the parade route to have marched on Richmond and taken it in about ten days-that was Flora Hamburger’s sardonic thought, at any rate. The soldiers had orders-highly publicized orders-to shoot to kill at the first sign of trouble and a look that said they would have enjoyed doing it. They seemed disappointed when the Socialists didn’t give them the chance.

“Now it’s our turn,” Flora said back at the Fourteenth Ward Socialist Party offices after the sun set on a day without incident. “May Day next week, and then we show them what we really think of their government and their war.”

“They still may try to find some way to keep us from holding our parade,” Herman Bruck said nervously.

“There is such a thing as the Constitution of the United States,” Flora said. “We have the right to petition for redress of grievances, unless they put New York under martial law the way they did to Utah, and we’ll make absolutely certain we give them no excuse to do that.”

“We don’t necessarily have to give them any excuses.” Maria Tresca’s brown eyes flashed. “An agent provocateur-”

“I wouldn’t put anything past Teddy Roosevelt,” Bruck said darkly.

“As a matter of fact, I doubt TR would authorize anything like that,” Flora said. “He’s a class enemy, but he has the full set of upper-class notions about legitimate and illegitimate ways and means.” As a storm of disagreement washed over her, she held up a warning hand. “That doesn’t mean I don’t think there will be any provocations. His henchmen don’t worry about the niceties. But I don’t think the order for provocations comes straight from the top. Give the devil his due. Better-give him a good kick in the tukhus and send him home in November.”

That swung people back to her. Planning went on-the order of march for unions from all the different trades that would be joining up, and, as important, the order of the speakers. Bruck said, “Such a pity Myron won’t be here to tell the people the truth.”

Everyone sighed. For a moment, the mood in the offices went soft and sad. Congressman Zuckerman had been able to rouse a crowd almost the way a goyishe preacher could in a tent-show revival. Reverently, Flora said, “If you weren’t a Socialist after you heard Myron Zuckerman, you’d never be a Socialist.” She forced herself back to business, back to practicality: “But he’s not here, and we have to go on without him.”

Herman Bruck appointed himself to the podium. Flora bit down on her lower lip. Herman wouldn’t come close to Zuckerman as an orator if he lived twenty years longer than Methuselah. As far as she was concerned, Zuckerman dead was a better orator than Herman Bruck alive.

She was about to add her own name to the list to counteract Bruck (not that she would have put it so crassly) when he said, “And of course, to keep the ladies happy, we’ll have a woman speaker or two. Flora, why don’t you take care of that for us?”

She’d never had to get out the hatpin to stop him from feeling her up. She felt like pulling it from her hat now, though, and sticking it into him about three inches deep. The way he casually dismissed the importance of half the human race was, in a way, a worse violation than if he’d tried to squeeze her bosom. Maybe worse still was that he hadn’t the slightest idea of what he’d done.

“I’ll speak to the women,” she said through tight lips, “and to the men, too.”

“That’s fine,” Bruck said, nodding genially-no, he hadn’t a clue. She studied him-perfect coif, perfect clothes, perfect confidence. Inside, where it didn’t show, she smiled a hunter’s smile. Perfect target.

When she got home that evening, she found her mother and her younger sister, Esther, in tears. Little Yossel, her nephew, was in tears, too, but only in the ordinary, babyish way of things. “What’s wrong?” Flora exclaimed in alarm.

With trembling finger, her mother pointed to the supper table. There, among the advertising circulars, lay an envelope with a formidable heading:

Government of the United States of America, War Department

The next line, set in slightly smaller type in the same hard-to-read font, said,

Bureau of Selection for Service

The envelope was addressed to David Hamburger.

“Oh, no,” Flora whispered. The older of her younger brothers had turned eighteen a few months before, and had dutifully enrolled himself at the local Selection for Service Bureau offices. The penalties for failing to enroll-and the rewards for informants-were too high to make any other course possible. Ever since then, the family had known this day might and probably would come. That made it no easier to bear on its arrival.

Benjamin Hamburger came in next. He spotted the envelope without prompting. He said nothing, but walked into the kitchen, filled a shot glass with whiskey, and knocked it back. He breathed heavily. After a moment, he filled the glass again and drained it as quickly as before. He often took one drink. Flora could not remember the last time he’d taken two.

The apartment was eerily silent when David walked in. As Flora had, he asked, “What’s wrong?” No one spoke, just as no one ever mentioned the Angel of Death. But the angel was there, mentioned or not. So was the envelope. No one had opened it; the Hamburgers never opened one another’s mail, and when it was likely to be a letter like this…David did the job himself. “They want me to report for my physical examination next Tuesday-the second,” he said.

Sophie had come in while he was opening the envelope. She still wore mourning for her husband. She began to wail as she had when she’d learned Yossel was dead. Nothing could console her. Her dismay set little Yossel, who had calmed down, to wailing again. That was the scene on which Isaac Hamburger walked in.

“It’ll be all right,” David said, over and over, perhaps trying to convince himself as well as his kin. “It can’t be helped, anyhow.” Where the other might well have been wrong, that, at least, was true.

Flora never remembered what she had for supper that night. While she was making final preparations for the May Day parade, her brother would be looking forward to getting poked and prodded by coldhearted men in white coats, intent on seeing how he would suit as cannon fodder. She found herself wishing he were pale and consumptive, not strong and ruddy and bursting with life. Life could burst, all right, so easily. The family had seen that.

She went into the office the next morning full of grim determination to keep countless other young men from having to face the danger her brother was all too likely to confront. That meant throwing all her energy into working with the groups taking part in the parade, and into working with the authorities to make sure it went off with as little interference as possible.

“We will be peaceable,” she promised over and over again. “We won’t provoke anything. Don’t provoke us in return, and don’t let the Soldiers’ Circle goons provoke us. The United States still have a Constitution, don’t they?” The authorities needed to be reminded of that even more than Herman Bruck did.

Some of the answers she got from police captains and city bureaucrats were conciliatory, some ambiguous at best, and more than a few downright hostile. She did what she could to defuse those. Sighing late in the afternoon on the Saturday before the parade, she said, “I’ve made more compromises the past week than in all the time I worked here up till then.”

“It’s good training for Congress,” Maria Tresca answered. The look she sent toward Flora was speculative, to say the least. Flora didn’t answer, not in words, but her smile was jauntier than she would have thought possible, considering how tired she was.

Herman Bruck never noticed the byplay. He was busy, too-impressively, ostentatiously busy-drafting his speech.

May Day dawned warm and muggy, a day right out of July. More than a few men in the crowds lining Broadway sported straw hats instead of homburgs or caps, as if it truly were summer. The band at the head of the parade-not so fancy as the military bands that strutted down the avenue on Remembrance Day-struck up the “Internationale,” then the “Marseillaise,” and last the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Everyone cheered the national anthem; the other two brought mingled cheers and boos.

“The hell with the frogs, and the hell with their song!” somebody shouted.

“It’s a song of revolution,” Flora shouted back as she marched along. “It’s a song against tyranny and oppression, and for freedom. Don’t you think we need that?”

“They’re the enemy!” the heckler yelled to her.

“They’ve forgotten freedom,” she returned. Defiantly, she added, “And so have we.”

A few eggs flew out of the crowd toward the parade. The cops didn’t do anything about that. When somebody threw a bottle instead, though, they waded in, nightsticks swinging. Flora gave a judicious nod. Throwing eggs wasn’t that far from heckling, and the Constitution protected heckling no matter who did it. A bottle, now, a bottle was liable to be lethal.

One of the red banners the Socialists carried showed a bare-chested Negro carrying a rifle. REVOLUTION OF THE CSA-1915. REVOLUTION IN THE USA-19??.

“The Rebs put the niggers down!” That cry came out of the crowd at least twice every city block.

The Socialists were ready for it: “Does that mean you want us to act just like the Confederates?” Identifying U.S. actions with those of the hated enemy reduced all but the most politically savvy hecklers to confusion-better yet, to speechless confusion.

Jews and Irishmen, Italians and a few Negroes, Anglo-Saxons and Germans, too, the marchers made their way up to Central Park, where they congregated for the speeches. Herman Bruck and Flora climbed up onto the platform packed with politicians and labor leaders. Bruck eyed her with complacent glee and introduced her to some of the Socialist bigwigs (something even an egalitarian party possessed) she hadn’t yet met.

Big Bill Haywood eyed her, too, in a manner that tempted her to take out the hatpin. He had only one eye that tracked and he stank of whiskey, but the furious energy he brought to any cause-whether organizing or striking-made him a force for the money power to reckon with. “Give ’em hell, missy,” he said in a gravelly bass. “They deserve it.”

Senator Debs of Indiana was more urbane but no more ready to back down. “TR wants to deal with us as the French dealt with the Paris Commune,” he said. “We’ll show him we are stronger, even in the midst of this foolish war we never should have agreed to help finance.” He grimaced at the tactical blunder his party had made back in 1914. Flora wondered, though, whether he would say the same thing if, as seemed likely, he gained the Socialist nomination for president later in the year.

One speaker after another went up to the podium, blasted the Democrats, praised labor to the skies, and withdrew. “And now, from the Fourteenth Ward, home of the late, great Congressman Zuckerman, Mr. Herman Bruck!” yelled the fellow in charge of keeping the speeches in some kind of order.

He stepped back. Herman Bruck stepped forward. He delivered his speech. Flora stopped listening to it about a minute and a half in. It was everything she’d thought it would be, in its strengths and weaknesses, the latter summarized by the yawns she saw out in the crowd.

Bruck finished and stepped back to polite, tepid applause. “Also from the Fourteenth Ward, Miss Flora Hamburger!” the presenter shouted.

Trying to ignore the pounding of her heart, Flora looked out over the podium at the sea of faces out there. “Birds have nests!” she cried, and pounded a fist down on the polished wood. “Foxes have dens! What does the proletariat have? Nothing but the strength of its right arms, for the capitalists have stolen everything else! And now, not content with that, they send the workers of our country-the workers of the world-out to die by millions in a war that has nothing to do with them. Do we sit idly by and let that happen? Or do we take action, brothers and sisters?”

Maybe fear for David, who would go in for his examination tomorrow, lent her even more passion than she would have had otherwise. However that was, by the time she finished, the applause she got lifted her far higher above the crowd than could have been accounted for by the platform alone. She stepped back dazed, hardly knowing what she’d done.

Big Bill Haywood’s hungry stare put her in mind of a wolf eyeing a slab of steak. Eugene Debs said, “Young lady, I think I shall tear up my own speech.” Herman Bruck looked half astonished, half terrified. That, somehow, was sweetest of all.

Tom Kennedy put a friendly arm around Cincinnatus’shoulder. “Come on into the back room,” he said. “Have a cigar with us.” He laughed. So did Joe Conroy. The storekeeper waved Cincinnatus into that back room.

With no small reluctance, he followed the two white men in there. Inside, he was sighing-no, worse, he was sweating. He didn’t want to have anything to do with the Confederate underground still operating in Covington, Kentucky, not any more he didn’t. But, quite literally, they knew where he lived. If they wanted him to play along, he either had to do it or betray them to the U.S. occupying authorities and then live in fear for the rest of his life. For now, going along seemed less dangerous.

The back room smelled of tobacco and spices and sweets and leather, with a faint undertone of potatoes going bad. To his surprise, Conroy reached into a cigar box and handed him a plump panatella. “Thank you, suh,” he said in some surprise. Kennedy was the one who’d always treated him pretty well. To Conroy, he’d been just another hired nigger.

“Hear tell you’ve been drivin’ trucks all over creation for the damnyankees these past few weeks,” Conroy said. “Reckon that’s why you ain’t been in to see us much, even when we put the signal up in the window for you.”

“It’s a fact, suh,” Cincinnatus agreed, gratefully seizing on the excuse the storekeeper offered him. “Sometimes I’m gone fo’ days at a time.”

“That’s fine,” Tom Kennedy said. He was thin and dapper and clever; it wasn’t by accident he’d been running the hauling firm for which Cincinnatus had worked before the war. “I always knew there was a lot to you, Cincinnatus. Once we win the war, smart black fellows like you will have a lot more chances in the CSA, I reckon. It’s in the cards.”

“You say that even after the Red uprisin’?” Cincinnatus asked. Kennedy and Conroy didn’t know he was a part-time Red himself, but he was in no danger of blowing his cover with the question-the only people who didn’t know about the Red Negro attempted revolution were dead.

Kennedy nodded, quite seriously. “Hell, yes, I say that. Richmond won’t ever want that kind of thing to happen again, not ever, I tell you. Too many niggers to hold down all of you, so I figure they’ll have to give you some of what you want. Don’t you?”

Cincinnatus shrugged. He eyed Joe Conroy. The storekeeper nodded, however unenthusiastically. That made Cincinnatus think Kennedy might be right. The next question was, did he care? That was harder to answer. A few weeks before, he would have said a Confederacy with some rights for blacks didn’t sound too bad. But now that he’d met Lieutenant Straubing, it didn’t sound too good, either. He’d seen that men who didn’t care about color were rare in the USA. In the CSA, they weren’t rare-they simply didn’t exist.

Taking his silence for consent, Kennedy picked up the box from which Conroy had drawn the panatella and the box under it. He opened the one under that. It held, not cigars, but thin-walled lead cylinders of about the same size. Cincinnatus didn’t know what they were for, but he figured Kennedy would tell him.

He was right. Kennedy picked up one of the tubes and said, “Thanks to these little sugar plums, we can make the Yankees very unhappy. There’s a copper disk edge-on right in the middle here”-he held the cylinder toward a kerosene lamp, so Cincinnatus could see it wasn’t hollow quite all the way through-“that divides it into two compartments. You put sulfuric acid in one, picric acid in the other, cork both ends with wax plugs-and then all you have to do is wait.”

“Wait for what?” Cincinnatus was starting to get an idea, but, again, he didn’t know enough to be sure.

“When the sulfuric acid eats through the copper, it mixes with the picric acid, right?” Kennedy said with a grin that would have made him a hell of a snake-oil salesman. “And out both ends of the tube comes the nicest little spurt of flame you ever did see. Melts down the bomb so nothing’s left and starts a hell of a fire, both at the same time. Set one in a crate of shells, say-”

“I see what you’re talkin’ about, Mr. Kennedy, I surely do,” Cincinnatus said. The Confederates had indeed come up with a nasty little toy here. “How much time goes by ’fore the stuff in there eats through the copper and the fire starts?”

“Depends on how thick the copper disk is,” Conroy answered. “Anywhere from an hour or so to a couple of weeks. We got all kinds. You don’t need to worry about that.”

“Good,” Cincinnatus said. It wasn’t good, but it was better than it might have been. If he started setting firebombs all over creation, the Yankees would take a while to associate the blazes with him. But, sooner or later, they would. He had no doubt of that. The Yankees weren’t stupid. Even Lieutenant Kennan did his job well enough, no matter how wrongheaded his ideas about Negroes were.

Conroy and Kennedy probably didn’t think the Yankees were stupid, either. What they did think was that Cincinnatus was stupid. With a big, false smile pasted across his face, the storekeeper said, “See how easy it’ll be, boy? Not a chance in the world of getting caught.”

Cincinnatus glanced over to Tom Kennedy. Kennedy treated him as well as any Confederate white had ever done, and sometimes showed, or seemed to show, some understanding that dark skin didn’t mean no brains. If Kennedy warned him to be careful now when he picked his spots, and to make sure he didn’t bring suspicion down on himself…he wasn’t sure what he’d do then, but at least he’d have proof in his former boss’ actions that the CSA might see its way clear to looking at Negroes as human beings once the war was done.

Kennedy smiled, too. “Joe is right, Cincinnatus,” he said. “You can see for yourself, they won’t ever have a clue about how the fires start. You can do the cause a whole lot of good.”

“I see that, Mistuh Kennedy, suh,” Cincinnatus said slowly. The Confederate cause came first with Kennedy, too. “How do I tell the few-hour bombs from the ones that go for days ’fore they catch on fire?”

Tom Kennedy’s smile got broader. He clapped Cincinnatus on the back. “You’re a good fellow, you know that? Here, I’ll show you.” He held out one of the lead tubes. “The time it’s set for is stamped right here, you see. This one’s a six-hour delay.” He held up a warning forefinger. “That’s not perfect, mind you. It might be four hours, and it might be eight. But it won’t be two hours, and it won’t be two days, either.”

“I got you,” Cincinnatus said. It was a good system. It would do damage. It would also get traced back to him, sure as the sun would set tonight and come up again tomorrow.

Conroy and Kennedy had a rucksack ready for him to carry home. It contained lead tubes inset with copper disks of varying thickness, a glass jar full of oily-looking sulfuric acid, and another jar that held a powdery, yellowish substance, presumably picric acid. It also had a couple of dozen wax stoppers, a spoon, and a couple of glass funnels. “You don’t want to get this stuff, either kind, on your skin, or let the one go through the funnel that’s held the other,” Conroy said. If the storekeeper was warning him, Cincinnatus figured he was dealing with nasty stuff indeed.

The rucksack was small, but surprisingly heavy-lead was like that. Cincinnatus felt almost as if he’d lugged a crate of ammunition home with him. When he got back to the house, Elizabeth’s eyebrows shot up at the burden he brought in. “You don’t want to know,” he told her, and she didn’t ask any more questions. She’d learned you were liable to be better off without some answers than with them.

That evening, working in the sink after Elizabeth had gone to bed, Cincinnatus carefully made up three firebombs, one with a one-day disk, one with a two-day disk, and one with a fourteen-day disk, the longest in the whole set of tubes the men from the Confederate underground had given him. He accidentally spilled a drop of sulfuric acid on the galvanized iron. It steamed and bubbled and was doing its best to eat its way right through the sink till he poured lots of water on it. Afterwards, he eyed the discolored spot with considerable respect.

He didn’t like having the bombs in his pocket when he went to work the next morning. If a stopper came loose, he figured he’d like it even less. Nodding in a friendly way to Lieutenant Straubing came hard.

Along with the other drivers, he rattled south, and stopped to drop his cargo-small-arms ammunition, from what was stenciled on the crates-a little past one in the afternoon. While laborers unloaded the trucks, he ate his lunch and wandered around. Planting a couple of bombs was as easy as Kennedy and Conroy had said it would be.

Night had fallen by the time he got back to Covington. “See you tomorrow, Cincinnatus,” Lieutenant Straubing called, and waved.

“Yes, suh.” Cincinnatus waved back. He walked home. No signal for him in Conroy’s front window today-the Confederate underground had got what it wanted from him. The general store was quiet and dark, closed for the day. He ducked into the alley behind the place to make sure nothing was wrong, then went on home.

He made up a couple of more bombs that evening, and planted them the next day. That evening, Conroy waved to him as he walked past-word of the first fire he’d set must have already got back to the storekeeper. Glad you’re happy, Cincinnatus thought, and returned the wave, as he had Lieutenant Straubing’s.

Twelve days later, Conroy’s store burned to the ground.

Jonathan Moss’ thumb stabbed the firing button. The tracers his machine gun spat helped him guide the line of fire across the fuselage of the British biplane whose pilot hadn’t spied him coming till too late. The flier slumped over his controls, dead or unconscious. His aeroplane spun down, down, down. Moss followed it down, on the off chance the limey was shamming. He wasn’t. The aeroplane crashed into the battered ground of no-man’s-land and began to burn.

Moss pulled up sharply. Down there in the trenches, men in khaki were blazing away at him. He didn’t take them for granted, not any more. They’d brought him down once. He wanted to give them as little chance of doing it again as he could.

A couple of bullets punched through the fabric covering his single-decker’s wings. The sound brought remembered fear, in a way it hadn’t when the Englishman put some rounds through there. No aeroplane had ever knocked him out of the sky, which meant he could make himself believe no aeroplane could knock him out of the sky. He couldn’t pretend, even to himself, that the infantry, which had got lucky once, might not get lucky again.

Small arms still aimed his way. Looking back in the rearview mirror mounted on the edge of the cockpit, he saw muzzle flashes bright as the sun. But his altimeter was winding steadily. By the time he passed twenty-five hundred feet, which didn’t take long, he was pretty safe.

Up above him, Dud Dudley waggled his wings in a victory salute. Moss waved back to the flight leader. His buddies had covered for him while he flew down to confirm his kill of the British biplane. He waved again. Good fellows, he thought.

Looking around for more opponents, he found none. Dudley waggled his wings again, and pointed back toward the aerodrome. Moss checked his fuel gauge. He had less gas left than he’d thought. He didn’t argue or try to pretend he hadn’t seen, but took his place in the flight above, behind, and to the left of Dudley.

One after another, the four Martin single-deckers bounced to a stop on the rutted grass of the airstrip outside Cambridge, Ontario. Groundcrew men came trotting up, not only to see to the aeroplanes but also to pick up the word on what had happened in the war in the air. “Johnny got one,” Tom Innis said, slapping Moss on the back hard enough to stagger him. Innis’ grin was wide and fierce and full of sharp teeth, as if he were more wolf than man.

“That’s bully, Lieutenant!” The groundcrew men crowded around him. One of them pressed a cigar into a pocket of his flying suit. “Knock ’em all down, sir.” “The more you sting, the fewer they’ve got left.”

Eventually, the fliers detached themselves and headed for Captain Pruitt’s office to make their official report. “That was really fine shooting, sir,” Phil Eaker said. He was skinny and blond and unlikely to be as young as he looked. Nobody, Moss thought from the height of his mid-twenties, was likely to be as young as Phil Eaker looked. He also hadn’t had enough flying time to harden him yet. That would come-if he lived.

“I dove on him out of the sun,” Moss said, shrugging. He could smell the leftover fear in his sweat now that the slipstream wasn’t blowing it away. “If he doesn’t know you’re there, that’s the easiest way to do the job. He only got off a few rounds at me.”

When the war broke out, he’d thought of himself as a knight of the air. Nothing left him happier now than a kill where the foe didn’t have much chance to kill him. He suspected knights in shining armor hadn’t cried in their beer when they were able to bash out a Saracen’s brains from behind, either.

Hardshell Pruitt looked up from the papers on his desk when Dudley and the men of his flight ducked into his tent. The squadron commander pulled out a binder, dipped his pen into a bottle of ink, and said, “Tell me, gentlemen. Try to give me the abridged version. I spend so much time filling out forms”-he waved at the documents over which he’d been laboring-“I haven’t been getting the flight time I need.”

“Yes, sir,” Dudley said. Concisely and accurately, he reported on the flight. The most significant item was Moss’ downing the British flying scout. Moss told a good deal of that tale himself.

“Well done,” Captain Pruitt said when he’d finished. “Let me just see something here.” He shuffled through some manila folders, opened one, read what was in it, and grunted. Then he said, “Very good, Moss. You’re dismissed. I have some matters I need to take up with your pals here. You may see them again, or I may decide to ship them all out for courts-martial.”

“I’m sure they all deserve it, sir,” Moss said cheerfully, which got him ripe raspberries from the other men in the flight. He ignored them, making his way back to his own tent. When he peeled off his flight suit, he realized how grimy and sweaty he was. The aerodrome had rigged up a makeshift showerbath from an old fuel drum set on a wooden platform. The day held a promise of summer. He didn’t even ask to have any hot water added to what was in there. He just grabbed some soap and scrubbed till he was clean.

Dudley, Innis, and Eaker still hadn’t returned from Captain Pruitt’s office by the time Moss got back to his tent. He scratched his freshly washed head. Maybe Hardshell hadn’t been joking, and they really were in Dutch.

He smoked the cigar the groundcrew man had given him, stretched out on his cot, and dozed for half an hour. His tentmates weren’t back when he woke up. He muttered under his breath. What the devil had they done? Why the devil hadn’t they let him do some of it, too?

He got up, went outside, and looked around. No sign of them. Hardly any sign of anybody, when you got down to it. He ambled over to the officers’ lounge. You could always find somebody there. It was nearly sunset, too, which meant the place ought to be filling up for some heavy-duty, professional drinking, the way it did every night.

Except tonight. Oh, a couple of pilots from another squadron were in there soaking up some whiskey, but the place was dead except for them. “Somebody get shot down?” Moss wondered out loud. It was the only thing he could think of, but it didn’t strike him as very likely. When a fellow died up in the sky, his comrades usually drank themselves stupid to remember him and to forget they might be next.

Drinking alone wasn’t Moss’idea of fun, and the other two pi-lots didn’t seem interested in company. Having nothing better to do, he was about to wander off and sack out when a groundcrew corporal poked his head into the lounge, spotted him, and exclaimed, “Oh, there you are, sir! Jesus, I’m glad I found you. Hardshell-uh, Captain Pruitt-he wants to see you right away. I was you, sir, I wouldn’t keep him waiting.” He disappeared.

Moss hopped to his feet. Whatever trouble his flightmates were in, maybe he’d found a piece of it after all. He hurried over to the captain’s tent, which was only a few feet away, wishing he hadn’t been so blithely agreeable about Hardshell’s court-martialing his friends. He was liable to be seeing a court himself.

Captain Pruitt stood outside the tent. Moss didn’t think that was a good sign. Shadow shrouded the squadron commander’s face. He grunted on seeing Jonathan approach. “Here at last, are you?” he growled. “Well, you’d better come in, then.”

Rudely, he ducked through the tentflap by himself and didn’t hold it for Moss. Shaking his head, Moss followed. He was going to get it, all right. Braced for the worst, he lifted the canvas and followed Captain Pruitt inside.

Light blazed at him. All the fliers he hadn’t been able to find packed the inside of the tent. They lacked only a coating of olive oil to be sardines in a can. Tom Innis pressed a pint of whiskey into Moss’ hand. “Congratulations!” everybody shouted.

Moss stared in astonishment. “What the devil-!” he blurted.

Laughter erupted and rolled over him in waves. “He doesn’t even know!” Dud Dudley hooted.

“Clear a space and we’ll show him, then,” Captain Pruitt said.

Clearing a space wasn’t easy. A few people, grumbling, had to go outside. When Moss finally saw Pruitt’s desk, it was for once clear of papers. A cake sat on top of it instead, a rectangular cake with white frosting. A big chocolate symbol turned it into an enormous playing card, with chocolate A’s at the appropriate corners.

“My God!” Moss said. “Was that my fifth?” He counted on his fingers. “Jesus, I guess it was.”

“Here we have something new,” Pruitt observed: “the unintentional ace.”

More laughter rang out. Dud Dudley said, “It’s a good thing you finally showed up. We were going to eat this beauty without you in a couple of minutes, and then spend the next five years gloating about it.”

“Give me a piece,” Moss said fiercely.

“You want a piece, go to the brothel,” Innis told him. “You want some cake, stay here.” A bayonet lay next to the cake. He picked it up and started slicing.

Cake and whiskey wasn’t a combination Moss had had before. After he’d taken a couple of good swigs from the pint, he didn’t much care. The hooch was good, the cake was good, the company was good, and he didn’t think at all about the man he’d killed to earn the celebration.