Breakthroughs

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Captain Jonathan Moss looked down on the tortured Canadian landscape from on high, as if he were a god. He knew better, of course. If one of the shells the Americans aimed at the Canadian and British troops who had blocked their way for so long happened to strike his Wright two-decker, he would crash. The same, assuredly, was true of the shells the enemy hurled back at the U.S. forces, and of the Archie their antiaircraft guns sent up.

Spring was at last in full spate. The land was green, where shellfire hadn’t turned it to mucky brown pulp. All the streams flowed freely; the ice had melted. And the line was beginning to move, too, though it had been frozen longer than any Canadian river.

Below Moss, U.S. troopers advanced behind a large contingent of barrels that battered their way through the defenses the Canucks and limeys had built with such enormous expenditure of labor. The Canadians had barrels, too, though not so many. They dueled with the American machines in a slow, ugly, two-dimensional version of the war Moss and his friends-and his foes as well-fought in the air.

He spied a flight of enemy fighting scouts down near the deck. They were shooting up the advancing Americans, who grew vulnerable when they came up out of their trenches to attack. But the Entente aeroplanes were vulnerable, too. Moss pointed them out to his own flightmates, then took his American copy of a German Albatros into a dive better suited to a stooping falcon. Percy Stone, Hans Oppenheim, and Pete Bradley followed.

Wind screamed in Moss’ face. It tried to tear the goggles off his eyes, and peeled lips back from teeth in an involuntary grin. The grin would have been on his face anyhow, though. His gaze flicked back and forth from the unwinding altimeter to the enemy aeroplanes. The British or Canadian pilots were having such a high old time shooting up American infantry, they made the mistake of not checking the neighborhood often enough. Moss intended to turn it into a fatal mistake if he could.

His thumb came down on the firing button. The twin machine guns roared, spitting bullets between the two wooden blades of the prop. If the interrupter gears didn’t function properly, as, every so often, they didn’t…but contemplating that kind of misfortune gave no better profit than thinking about one’s own path intersecting that of a shell.

Tracers let him direct his fire onto the rearmost enemy fighting scout. He must have hit the pilot, for the Sopwith Pup slammed into the ground an instant later and burst into flame.

“That’ll teach you, you son of a bitch!” he shouted exultantly. Pups had been machines of terror when set against the Martin one-deckers U.S. pilots had been flying for so long. So long was right-that was what you said when you went up against a Pup in a one-decker. But the new Wright machines had helped even the odds.

Another Pup started to burn. The pilot turned for home, but never got there. He didn’t have much altitude, and rapidly lost what he had. He tried to land the aeroplane, but rolled into a shell hole and nosed over. Fire raced down the length of the fighting scout. For the pilot’s sake, Moss hoped the crash had killed him.

The other two Sopwith Pups twisted away from Moss’ flight. On the level, they were slightly faster than the not-quite-Albatroses the Americans flew, and succeeded in making good their escape.

Moss led his comrades up out of that part of the sky where a lucky rifle or machine-gun bullet could put paid to a fighting scout. Climbing was slower work than diving had been. Before he got out of range of small-arms fire from the ground, a couple of bullets went through his wings with about the sound a man would have made by poking a stick through a tightly stretched drumhead.

Hans Oppenheim was the pilot pumping his fist up over his head, so Moss assumed he’d brought down that second Pup. Moss couldn’t imagine anything else that would have got the phlegmatic Oppenheim excited enough to show such emotion.

He looked at his watch. They’d been in the air well over an hour. He looked at his fuel gauge. It was getting low. He oriented himself, more from the way the trenches ran than by his unreliable compass, and found northwest. “Time to get back to Arthur,” he said, and let the slipstream blow the words back to his comrades.

They couldn’t hear him, of course. With their engines roaring, they couldn’t hear a damn thing, any more than he could. But they saw his gestures and, in any case, they knew what he was doing and why. They couldn’t have had any more gasoline in their tanks than he did in his.

The aerodrome was surprisingly busy when he and the rest of his flight bumped over the rutted fields. It was the kind of activity he hadn’t seen for a long time. Everybody was tearing things up by the roots and pitching them into trucks and wagons.

“We’re moving up?” Moss asked a groundcrew man after he shut off the Wright’s engine and his words were no longer his private property.

“Hell, yes,” the mechanic answered as Moss descended from the cockpit and, awkward in his thick flying suit, came down to the ground. “Front is moving forward, so we will, too. Don’t want you burning up too much gas getting where you’re going.”

“That sounds plenty good to me,” Moss said.

“Me, too.” The groundcrew man pointed to the bullet holes in the fabric covering the fighting scout’s wings. “Looks like the natives were restless.”

“Ground fire,” Moss replied with a shrug. “But I knocked down a Pup that was strafing our boys, and Hans got another one, and we came back without a scratch.”

“Bully, sir!” the groundcrew man said. “What’s that bring your score to?”

“Six and a quarter,” Moss answered.

“I knew you were an ace,” the fellow said, nodding.

Moss laughed-at himself. “And I’ll tell you something else, too: I was keeping track so well that they were able to give me a surprise party after my fifth victory, because I didn’t remember which one it was. Hans gets everybody drunk tonight, though-this was his first.”

His flightmates were down from their aeroplanes, too. He went over and thwacked Hans Oppenheim on the back. He hit Oppenheim a solid lick, too, but all the leather and wool his fellow flier had on armored him as effectively as anything this side of chainmail.

“Major Cherney will not be unhappy with us today,” Oppenheim said. He had all his self-possession back, and seemed faintly embarrassed to be the object of Moss’ boisterous congratulations.

Percy Stone shook his head. “Cherney won’t even notice we’re here, except that we give him some more things he has to think about. He’s got moving the aerodrome on his mind.”

“He doesn’t have to worry about moving our aeroplanes-we’ll fly ’em,” Pete Bradley said. “I just wonder where the hell we’re supposed to fly ’em to.”

“Don’t let ’em promote you past captain,” Stone advised Jonathan Moss. “Once you get oak leaves on your shoulders, you have to worry about too many other things to do as much flying as you want.”

“That’s so,” Moss said. He started to add that he would be as happy not to have unfriendly strangers shooting at him up in the sky. Before the words came out of his mouth, he realized they weren’t true. He never felt more alive than he did two or three miles above the ground, throwing his aeroplane through turns it wasn’t meant to make so he could get on an enemy’s tail or shake a Canuck off his own. It was pure, it was clean, and it made everything else in the world-fast motorcars, fast women-seem about as exciting as solitaire.

Women…maybe not. After the flight had reported to Major Cherney, the squadron commander said, “Get yourselves packed up, boys. You’re scheduled to move out bright and early tomorrow morning. New aerodrome’s over by Orangeville, twenty miles up the road. We have made some progress. And well done to you all. Hansie, first drink’s on me tonight, for losing your cherry.”

“Thank you, sir,” Oppenheim said. Moss never would have had the nerve to call him Hansie, not in a million years.

Back at the tent the flight shared, Moss looked over his meager belongings and said, “I can throw this stuff in a trunk and a duffel bag in half an hour flat. I think I’m going to take a walk before I pack.”

“I know where you’re walking,” Percy Stone said. Amusement glinted in his eyes. “I’ve walked that way a time or three. You’re wasting your time. She still hates Americans.”

“All right, maybe I am wasting my time,” Moss said. “At least I’ll be wasting it in better-looking company than any of you lugs.” He left the tent to the jeers of his flightmates.

When he got to Laura Secord’s farm, she was on her hands and knees in the vegetable garden, weeding. When she saw him, she gave him the same greeting she usually did: “Why don’t you go away, Yank?”

“That’s what I came to tell you,” he answered. “I am going away. The whole base is going away. I came to say I’d miss you.”

She glared at him, which only made him find her more attractive. “Well, I won’t miss you or any other Yank,” she answered, gray-blue eyes flashing. Then she softened a little. “Where is the base going?”

“I won’t tell you,” he answered. “If I did, you’d probably try to imitate your famous ancestor and let the British know where we are. I don’t want to wake up one night with bombs falling all over the place.”

Laura Secord bit her lip. She must have been thinking about doing just what he’d said. Indeed, she admitted it, saying, “You weren’t supposed to see through me. Go on, then. Go wherever you’re going. I only wish you-all you Yanks-were going out of my country and never coming back.”

“That isn’t going to happen,” he said. “In fact, I will tell you we’re going forward, because you could find that out for yourself.”

She looked down at the ground. When she raised her face again, it was wet with tears. “Damn you,” she whispered. “Damn all of you, however too many there are.”

Moss found himself with little to say after that. It was his usual condition in conversations with Laura Secord. But, for once, he did come up with something: “When the war is finally over, I hope your husband comes back here safe.” Most of him even meant it.

“Thank you, Captain Moss,” she said. “You make it hard for me to hate you in particular along with the United States.”

“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” he replied with a smile.

“It’s the nicest thing I’m likely to say to you, too,” she told him. “Now go your way, wherever it is that you dare not let me know.” With unmistakable emphasis, she returned to her weeding.

And Jonathan Moss walked back to the aerodrome and landing strips that would soon be abandoned. He’d never seen any of Laura Secord but her face, her hands, and her ankles. He’d never touched her. He’d rarely had anything but insults from her. He was whistling as he walked. He wondered why he felt so good.

The Dakota’s seaplane splashed down into the South Atlantic close by the battleship. Sailors on deck, Sam Carsten among them, waved to the pilot. He waved back, delighted as always to come down in one piece.

Carsten turned to Luke Hoskins and said, “I hope to Jesus he’s found something worth our while to fight. Otherwise, we’re going to have to turn around and head back to Chile.”

“Goddamn ocean is a big place,” Hoskins said, “and the limeys’ convoys are hugging the shore now that they know we’re in the neighborhood.”

“We’ve got to hit ’em in Argentine waters, too,” Carsten agreed unhappily. “If we sink half a dozen freighters inside Brazilian territory, it’s even money whether we scare Dom Pedro IV into coming in on our side or make him so mad, he’ll declare for the Entente.”

“I don’t want to get all that close inshore,” Hoskins said. “The limeys have been selling those damn little torpedo boats to Argentina the last twenty years, and everybody and his brother’s been selling ’em to the Empire of Brazil. Run up against one of those babies when you’re looking in the wrong direction and it’s liable to ruin your whole day.”

That was more talk from the shell-heaver than Sam had heard for the past week. “Those torpedo boats are one of the reasons we’ve got the destroyers playing tag with us,” he said.

“Come on, Sam, I know that-I didn’t ride into town on a load of turnips,” Luke Hoskins answered. “Here, let me ask it like this: are you happier knowing your neck is on the line if somebody on one of those goddamn pipsqueak four-stackers didn’t polish his telescope when he should have? Damned if I am, I’ll tell you that much.”

“Well, hell,” Sam said, “when you put it like that, I’m not, either.” He stared over toward the nearest destroyer, as if to make certain nobody on deck was asleep at the switch.

Out swung the crane. It plucked the aeroplane out of the water and hoisted it, pilot and all, onto the deck of the Dakota. As usual, Sam tried to get close enough to the machine to hear what the pilot was telling the officers who crowded round him. As usual, he failed.

Frustrated, he turned away-and almost ran into Vic Crosetti. “Stickin’ your nose in where it don’t belong, ain’t you, Sam?” Crosetti said.

“Yeah, same as you are,” Carsten returned.

Crosetti laughed, altogether unembarrassed. “Hey, everybody can tell I got a big nose, right?” He put a hand on the organ in question, which was indeed of formidable proportions. “You know what they say-big in the nose means big somewhere else, too.”

“In the ears, looking at you,” Sam said.

“You better watch yourself, Carsten,” Crosetti said, clenching a fist in mock anger. “Pretty soon we’re going to sail far enough north for the sun to remember its first name, and then they’ll stick an apple in your mouth, on account of the rest of you’s gonna look like a roast pig that needs a little more time in the oven.”

“I’d laugh like a damn loon if only that was a joke,” Carsten said, warily eyeing the sky. Here below the equator, fall was heading toward winter. He favored winter, and clouds, and storms.

Before long, the Dakota leaned into a long turn that swung her course to the west. The rest of the joint American-Chilean fleet moved with her. Vic Crosetti clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Pilot must have spotted a convoy sneaking along the coast,” he said happily. “I guess we’ll go leave ’em a calling card.”

“I’d say you’re likely right,” Sam agreed. “Using a battleship to sink freighters is like smashing a fly with an anvil, if anybody wants to know what I think, but nobody seems to.”

“I sure as hell don’t,” Crosetti said, grinning as he planted the barb.

When the hooting horns summoned the crew of the Dakota to battle stations, Hiram Kidde was grinning from ear to ear as he greeted the sailors who manned the five-inch gun. “Just like shooting fish in a barrel, boys,” the gunner’s mate said. “Fish in a barrel, sure as hell.”

“Fish in a barrel don’t shoot back,” Carsten said. “Fish in a barrel don’t man torpedo boats.”

“That’s right,” Luke Hoskins agreed. “That’s just right. Sam and I were talking about that topside.”

“It’s a risk,” “Cap’n” Kidde allowed. “But it ain’t a hell of a big risk, I’ll tell you that. I’d sooner take my chances against those damn mosquitoes than against a real live battleship any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.”

Nobody quarreled with that. Carsten stepped away from the breech of the five-inch gun and peered out of the sponson through the vision slit. He needed a moment to realize the horizon wasn’t smooth and unbroken, as it was farther out to sea. It had lumps and bumps on it. “We’re within sight of land,” he said in surprise.

“Won’t be much longer before things start happening, then,” Kidde predicted. “If you can see it from here, they’ve seen it from the observation mast for a while now. I wonder if the skipper aims to get in close enough to use the secondaries to sink the freighters, and save the wear and tear on the big guns.”

“That’d be good,” Sam said. “You get close enough to use the secondaries against a battleship and you’re in more trouble than you really want. We found out everything we wanted to know about that and then some in the Battle of the Three Navies-oh, Lord, didn’t we just?”

Heads bobbed up and down as all the men in the gun crew remembered the Dakota’s wild and undesired ride toward first the British and then the Japanese fleet. Hoskins said, “What I want to do is, I want to hit a torpedo boat with a five-inch shell. God damn me if there’d be anything left of the bastard but matchsticks and kindling.” The gun crew nodded again. Carsten liked the picture that made in his mind.

As he usually did, Hiram Kidde thought along with the officers in charge of the Dakota. Commander Grady, who was responsible for the starboard secondary armament, stepped into the crowded sponson and said, “Boys, they’re going to give us the fun this time. Pick your target, blow it to hell and gone, and then hit the next one. Every time you send a few thousand tons of meat and wheat to the bottom, you push the limeys that much closer to starving.”

“Yes, sir!” Kidde said. “It’ll be a pleasure, sir.”

“Good.” Grady hurried away to pass the word to the rest of the five-inch gun crews on his side of the battleship.

Kidde peered down into the rangefinder. “Inside nine thousand yards,” he murmured, and worked the elevation screw. To the crew, he added, “Let’s get a shell in the gun.”

Hoskins jerked one out of the magazine and passed it to Sam Carsten, handling the sixty-pound weight as if it were nothing. Sam slammed it into the breech and slid the block closed.

“Fire!” Kidde shouted.

Carsten jerked the lanyard. The gun roared and bucked. Stinking cordite fumes filled the sponson. The other guns of the secondary armament were roaring, too. Sam worked the breech mechanism. The empty brass shell casing clattered down onto the steel deck. Luke Hoskins handed him another shell. He slammed it home.

“That one was long,” Hiram Kidde reported, fiddling with the elevation screw again. When he was satisfied, he let out a grunt and shouted “Fire!” again. He grunted once more when the shell hit. “Short this time. All right-we’ve got the bastard straddled. Give me another one.”

“This one should be right on the money,” Sam said as he fired the cannon.

“Hit!” Kidde screamed. “That was a hit. Bastard’s burning! Pour a couple more into him, Carsten.”

“Right, ‘Cap’n,’ ” Sam said. “Feels good to do the shooting instead of getting shot at.”

When the first target had taken what Kidde reckoned to be fatal damage, he turned the gun toward another hapless freighter. But before he had the gun laid, he grunted yet again, this time in surprise. “Somebody’s shooting back at us,” he said. “I didn’t spot any flash or smoke, but a good-sized shell just splashed down forward of the bow.”

“Railroad gun somewhere inland?” Carsten asked.

“That’d be sneaky, wouldn’t it?” the gunner’s mate answered. “You got a nasty head on your shoulders, you know?” He peered through the vision slit. “Still don’t see anything, though.”

Guns topside started firing: not the titanic main armament, which Sam would have thought the proper response to a big gun mounted on a flatcar, but the one-pounders that had been bolted into place here and there on deck not long before the war began. Luke Hoskins, who had less imagination than any man Carsten knew, was the one who solved the riddle: “That wasn’t a shell, ‘Cap’n’-bet you anything it was a bomb off an aeroplane.”

Everybody in the gun crew stared at him. “Dip me in shit if I don’t think you’re right,” Kidde said. “Jesus! What do we do about that? Only way you knock down an aeroplane is by dumb fucking luck.” He shrugged. “They don’t pay me to worry about it. They pay me to fight this gun, and that’s what I’m going to do.” He finished turning it to its new target. “Fire!”

Sam jerked the lanyard. The gun bellowed. A moment later came the bellow of another explosion, this one on deck. It was a big explosion, a frighteningly big explosion. Bombs didn’t have to survive being shot out of guns the way shells did, Carsten realized. Not needing thick walls, they could carry a hell of a lot of explosive for their size.

Another blast shook the deck under Sam’s feet. He kept on loading and firing to Hiram Kidde’s commands. As Kidde had said, what else could he do? But then the Dakota turned away from the freighters he’d been shelling, away from the Argentine coast, and ran for the open sea. More bombs fell on and around her.

Hiram Kidde stared out the vision slit and then back at his gun crew. His face wore nothing but astonishment. “Aeroplanes!” he said, his voice cracking like a boy’s. “Aeroplanes! And they might have sunk us. What the hell is the world coming to?”

Newspapers in Cuba were printed roughly half and half, English and Spanish. Sipping his morning coffee, puffing on a fine Habana, Roger Kimball suddenly burst out laughing. “What’s funny, sir?” Tom Brearley asked.

Kimball pointed. “Look here. The damnyankees say they sank us.”

His exec scanned the item. He didn’t laugh. He got angry. “Those dirty, lying sons of bitches,” he burst out. “You can never trust what a Yankee says-never. My granddad taught me that, and they’ve proved he was right time after time after time. Hell, they make Jews look honest.”

“Don’t blow a gasket, Tom,” Kimball said. “When we came back here for refit, who took our place in the map box?”

“Hampton Ready’s boat,” Brearley answered at once. “He was in the class ahead of mine at Mobile.”

“Ready’s boat, yeah,” Kimball said: “the Bonito.”

Brearley needed a minute to take it in. When he did, he went from angry to grim in the blink of an eye. “You’re right,” he said. “Sure as hell, you’re right. And that means they really did sink him, too. Damn. He was a good sailor, and a good fellow, too.”

“Must have made it to the surface just long enough for the Yanks to get a fast look at the name, and then straight down before they could read it all. Christ.” Kimball shivered. That was a nasty way to go. There weren’t any nice ways to go, not when you jammed yourself down into a tin can and went after real ships. “You all right, Tom? You look green around the gills.”

Brearley didn’t answer, not directly. “Hamp’s wife just had a baby girl maybe six months ago. You know Katie? Little redhead; nice gal.”

“I’ve met her,” Kimball said. “Married man shouldn’t skipper a submersible. Makes you think too much.” But that didn’t solve Brearley’s problem-or Katie Ready’s now. Kimball couldn’t do anything about hers. About Brearley’s, and, he admitted to himself, his own…He waved. A swarthy waiter hurried over. “Two mojitos, pronto.”

“Dos mojitos. Si. Yes, sir,” the officers’ club waiter said. He hurried away, not seeing anything in the least unusual about a Navy officer ordering drinks with breakfast. Prohibition might have made strides on the Confederate mainland. It was only a word in Cuba, and a seldom-used word at that.

Rum and mint over crushed ice went enormously well with strong coffee and fine cigars. Tom Brearley drank half of his, looked thoughtful, and slowly nodded. “That was the medicine I needed, all right.”

“Steady you down,” Kimball agreed. He took a pull from his own mojito. “I grew up drinking whiskey, same as everybody else in Arkansas, but I’ll tell you, I could get used to rum.”

Brearley nodded. “I’m the same way. It’s got the kick, no two ways about it.” He picked up the newspaper, then threw it down on the table, shaking his head. “Hamp Ready. That does hurt. Damn fine fellow.” He poured down the rest of the drink.

Kimball picked up the paper and read further. “Says the boat was sunk by the USS Ericsson.” He stiffened. “That’s the destroyer that’s been playing cat and mouse with us, all right. Ready wasn’t ready enough, and they got him.”

“That box on the map doesn’t have a boat in it now,” Brearley said. “We were going to go back and take over for the Bonito when she finished her tour. What do you want to bet they send us back fast as they can now?”

“You’re right, goddammit.” Kimball got up, slapped coins on the table, and left. Over his shoulder, he said, “If I don’t have much time to enjoy myself, I’m going to make the most of what I’ve got.”

Instead of heading for one of the many sporting houses that catered to Confederate Navy men, he walked down San Isidro Street, away from the harbor, till he came to a telegraph office. He sent a wire to his mother and the man she’d married after his father died. He hoped they’d get it; last he’d heard, the damnyankees had been close to overrunning the farm on which he’d grown up.

He sent another wire to Anne Colleton. Both read the same: I’M NOT AS EASY TO KILL AS THE YANKEES THINK. HOPE TO SEE YOU SOON. LOVE, ROGER. To his mother, hope to see you soon was a polite sentiment, nothing more. With Anne Colleton…He hoped to see her the very soonest he could, and with the most privacy he could arrange.

Telegrams sent, he hurried back toward the Bonefish. A fat commander with the three oak leaves of Supply above the stripes on his sleeve stood on the wharf alongside Kimball’s submersible. Longshoremen, some black, some swarthy like the waiter, streamed into and out of the boat. The officer from Supply checked off items on a clipboard.

“Good to see you here, Skipper,” he said, nodding to Kimball. “We’re stepping things up-as best we can, anyhow. You’ll be going back to sea sooner than you might have hoped when you came into port.”

“Reckoned as much.” Kimball nodded back. “You all will have known about the Bonito a while before I worked it out.” He donned an exasperated expression, half genuine, half assumed for effect. “You might have been good enough to let me know my boat would be turning around in a hurry.”

“Oh, we would have gotten around to it, Commander, never fear,” the officer from Supply answered breezily. He did indeed have an impressive belly. He was smoking a cigar that made the one Kimball had enjoyed with breakfast seem a stogie made from weeds. Kimball wondered when he’d last set foot in an actual working vessel of the C.S. Navy. Probably when he’d reported to Havana, whenever that was. He didn’t come from Cuba; his accent said Alabama or Mississippi.

Fixing him with a gaze he might have sent toward a U.S. cruiser through his periscope, Kimball said, “I am like the fellow whose neighbor has a mean dog. I might put up with one bite, but sure as hell I won’t put up with two. If I need to know something, I expect to find out the minute I need to know it, not when somebody gets around to it.”

He didn’t advance on the commander from Supply. He didn’t clench his fist. He didn’t even raise his voice. The commander staggered back as if hit in that comfortable, well-upholstered belly even so. “I’m sure you won’t have any trouble like that in the future,” he said, pasting a wide, placating smile on his face and taking the fancy cigar out of his mouth to make the smile even wider.

“Good.” Kimball still didn’t raise his voice, but the officer from Supply took another couple of steps back. Kimball strode past him and climbed down into the noisome darkness that was the interior of the Bonefish.

Ben Coulter had things well in hand there. After a stretch of time with the crew out and the boat cleaned up as much as it could be, the stench had diminished. It was still enough to make most sailors in the surface Navy turn up their toes, or perhaps heave up their breakfasts. To Kimball, it was the smell of home.

“Long as we can keep things fresh, sir, we’ll live like kings,” Coulter said. “Plenty of eggs and meat and fish and greens-some of ’em are these funny Cuban vegetables that look like God forgot what he was doin’ when He was makin’ ’em, but you boil ’em long enough and they all taste the same, sure as hell. Yes, sir, like kings.”

“Crowded kings,” Kimball remarked, and the veteran first mate nodded. Kimball and Coulter both knew perfectly well that before long they’d be eating beans and salt pork and stinking sauerkraut and drinking orange juice and lemon juice to hold scurvy at bay. As a cruise wore along, fresh-caught fish became a luxury. Dwelling on better times was more enjoyable.

“We’re full up on shells again, too, sir,” Coulter said. “Armorers haven’t come with the fish yet, though.”

“We’ll get ’em. We do most of our work with ’em these days,” Kimball said. “Too damn many ships with wireless. We need to sink ’em fast and sneaky.”

“Yes, sir.” Coulter nodded again. “Damnyankees keep pulling destroyers out of their hats, too, like magicians with rabbits. It’s getting so we can’t hardly take a shot at a freighter without dodging ash cans for the next week.”

“I know. I’m getting damn tired of it, too.” Kimball slapped Coulter on the back. “By the way they’re going at this resupply business, likely you’ve guessed we’ll be going out sooner than we reckoned when we got into Habana.”

Ben Coulter’s head went up and down once more. “Sure as hell did, sir. Reckon the Yankees must have done somethin’ nasty to the Bonito.”

“They sank her,” Kimball said bluntly, adding, “They thought she was the Bonefish; the Yankee papers are reporting us sunk.” That jerked a laugh out of the mate. Kimball went on, “The Ericsson got her-same destroyer that’s given us such a hard time. When we get back into our box on the map, Ben, I’m going to kill that bastard.”

“Oh, hell, yes,” Coulter said. “Can’t let the damnyankees own the whole damn ocean.”

“Can’t let ’em get past us, either,” Kimball said. “If they sit on England’s supply line, she’s out of the war. If England has to quit, we’ve lost, too, and so have the froggies.”

“Whole crew understands that, sir,” Coulter answered. Then he sighed. “Sure are a hell of a lot of Yankees tryin’ to get south of us these days when we’re cruising out there, though.”

Kimball didn’t reply. As far as he could see, the war was probably lost even if the U.S. Navy didn’t succeed in choking off England’s supply line to Argentina. It would take longer to lose if the British stayed in the fight, that was all.

He didn’t care. He had a job to do, and he was damn good at it. He had very little modesty, false or otherwise. He knew how good he was. He enjoyed doing what he was doing, too. As long as the CSA stayed in the fight, he’d do it as well as he could. And if the Yankees sank him…well, he’d already hurt the USA a lot worse than losing the Bonefish would hurt his own country.

When he got back to his quarters, a telegram was waiting. He wasted no time in tearing open the envelope. “If this here is from my ma,” he muttered, “I’m going to be disappointed as hell.”

But it wasn’t. Anne Colleton wrote, GLAD THE YANKS ARE BAD FISHERMEN. LET ME KNOW NEXT TIME. MAYBE WE’LL MEET HALFWAY. ANNE. No love, not from her. Not even a promise. Kimball had seen such fripperies were not her style. But a maybe from a woman like that was worth a lay from half a dozen of the ordinary sort. Kimball carefully tore the telegram into tiny pieces. He was smiling as he did it.

As it happened, Arthur McGregor wasn’t far from the farmhouse when two green-gray Fords turned off the road from Rosenfeld and onto the path that led to his home. He decided he wouldn’t go out to the fields after all, but turned and walked back.

The motorcars got there before he did. U.S. soldiers with bayoneted rifles piled out of one of them. More soldiers got out of the other. Instead of a Springfield in his hands, one of those men wore a pistol on his hip. Major Hannebrink was slim and quick-moving and dapper, easy to recognize from a long way off. McGregor scowled, but did not pick up his pace.

When he reached the knot of soldiers, he looked down at the American officer, who was several inches shorter than he. “You must think I’m a dangerous character,” he said slowly, “if you need to bring all these bullies along when you come to say hello.”

“I don’t know whether you’re a dangerous character or not,” Hannebrink answered coolly, “but I don’t believe in taking chances, and I do aim to find out one way or the other.”

“Barn first, sir, or the house?” one of the soldiers-a sergeant-asked.

McGregor’s eyes went to the farmhouse. Maude was watching from the kitchen window, Julia alongside her. Mary wasn’t tall enough to see out. If her mother and sister hadn’t already told her soldiers were here, though, she’d know soon enough, and then she’d call them everything she knew how to call them, and she knew a surprising amount.

“House,” Hannebrink answered. “Get the women out of there. We’ll turn it inside out, and then we’ll do the barn.” He drew the pistol and pointed it at McGregor. “This gentleman won’t be going in there to take out anything he doesn’t fancy us seeing.”

“Wasn’t going to do that anyway,” McGregor said stolidly. “You bastards have stuck your noses in there before, and you never found a thing, because there’s nothing to find. You won’t find anything this time, either-still nothing.” He’d told that lie so many times, it came out smooth as the truth, though he’d never been a man who lied easily before Alexander was marched up against a wall and shot.

If they found the explosives…If they find them, it’s over, he thought. He wasn’t ready for it to be over, not yet. He hadn’t taken nearly enough revenge yet. But the best way to keep from betraying himself was to act as if whether they found what they were looking for didn’t matter.

Out came Maude and Julia and Mary, under the Yanks’ guns. Sure enough, his younger daughter, the spitfire, was doing her best to scorch the soldiers. It didn’t work so well as she might have hoped; one or two of the Americans, instead of getting angry, were fighting laughter.

A couple of the men in green-gray stayed with Major Hannebrink to stand guard on McGregor and his family. The rest went back into the house. Occasional crashes from within said they were indeed turning the place inside out. Hannebrink might have thought Maude was calm. McGregor knew better. He set a hand on his wife’s shoulder to keep her from hurling herself at the American major. Julia looked furious, and made no effort at all to hide it.

After an hour or so, the sergeant came out and said, “Sir, the worst thing they’ve got in there is kerosene for the lamps.”

“It’s good for killing lice, too,” Mary said, looking right at Hannebrink.

His lips thinned; that got home. But he said only, “We’ll have a look in the barn, then.” He gestured with the.45 in his hand. “Come on, McGregor. You can watch and make sure we don’t steal anything.”

“You’ve already stolen more from me than you can ever give back,” he answered. He knew why Major Hannebrink wanted him along: in the hope that he’d give something away.

Hannebrink turned to the women. “You can go clean up now,” he said. “That should give you something to do for the rest of the day.”

In the barn, the U.S. soldiers methodically went through everything, climbing up into the loft to poke their bayonets into the hay in the hope of finding hidden dynamite and also searching all the animals’ stalls. They opened every crate. They dumped the drawers set into McGregor’s workbench out onto the ground and pawed over his chisels and drill bits and screwdrivers, his twine and his carpenter’s rule.

He wondered if he’d somehow made a mistake, if he’d put one of the bomb-building tools in among the others. The low-voiced curses of the men in green-gray said he hadn’t.

He glanced toward the old wagon wheel. There it lay, rust on the iron tire, half covered with straw. One of the soldiers strode around it to get at a box by the far wall. He used a pry bar to open the box, whose lid was nailed shut. Then he turned it upside down. A couple of horseshoes that had worn thin, a broken scythe blade, and some other scrap iron spilled out onto the ground with a series of clanks.

“Thanks,” McGregor said. “Forgot I had that junk lying around. I can do something with it, I expect.”

“Go to hell, you damn murdering Canuck,” the Yankee soldier snapped. He took a long step over the wagon wheel and glared into McGregor’s face.

McGregor neither moved back nor blinked. Evenly, he said, “You’re the people who know all about murdering.”

Before the soldier could reply, Major Hannebrink broke in: “Enough, Neugebauer.” The private in green-gray stiffened to obedient attention. Hannebrink went on, “We don’t know that McGregor here is a murderer. We’re trying to find out.” He turned to the farmer. “So far, we have no evidence, only a man who thinks he has a reason to be angry at us.”

“You had no evidence against my son, either,” McGregor said. Not lunging at the U.S. officer was one of the hardest things he’d ever done. “You didn’t need any. You shot him without it.”

“I had evidence I thought good,” Hannebrink said. “I did my duty to my country. I would do it again.”

“I believe that,” McGregor said. “I don’t know why you’re bothering with this rigmarole. If you need evidence against me, you can always plant it whenever you please. Then you’ll haul me off to jail and shoot me, same as you did with Alexander.”

Hannebrink exhaled through his nose. “If I have no evidence against you, I have no quarrel with you. If you aren’t the man who’s been planting bombs hither and yon through the countryside, I don’t want to waste my time on you. I want to catch the son of a bitch who is doing that and make him pay.”

He sounded sincere. But then, to be good at his job he needed to sound sincere. McGregor answered, “If I was crazy enough to make bombs, I wouldn’t plant ’em hither and yon through the countryside.” He pointed to Hannebrink. “I’d go after you.”

“One of those bombs almost did kill me,” the U.S. major said.

“Really?” McGregor was calm, casual, cool. “Too bad it missed. I’d buy a beer for the fellow who got you, and then I’d hit him over the head with my mug, for doing it before I could.”

“You ought to bring him in for sedition, sir,” said the private-Neugebauer-who’d stepped over and around McGregor’s bomb-making supplies.

Hannebrink shook his head. Raising his voice a little, he asked, “Anything here even a little out of the ordinary?”

“No, sir,” the soldiers answered, almost in chorus.

Hannebrink shook his head again. “Then I’ve got no reason to bring him in. He does have some reason not to be in love with me. That doesn’t worry me. I did what I thought was right, and I’ll live with it. Let’s go back to town, boys.”

When they walked out to their Fords, they discovered that each of them had a punctured inner tube. Cursing, the soldiers set about patching the punctures. McGregor wanted to smile. He didn’t. He was too worried. All the soldiers had been back at the barn, and…

Major Hannebrink folded his arms across his chest. “If these punctures turn out to be knife cuts, Mr. McGregor, I am not going to be pleased with your family, I warn you.”

Oh, Mary, McGregor thought, what have you done? But then a soldier at the nearer motorcar said, “Sir, we got a nail in this one.”

“Don’t know what did this one, sir,” said Neugebauer, who was holding the inner tube from the other Ford, “but it looks like a hole, not a cut.”

“Anybody see anything?” Hannebrink asked. None of the U.S. soldiers answered. McGregor realized he hadn’t been breathing, and sucked in a long, ragged inhalation. The soldiers wouldn’t be thinking about a little girl. Even Hannebrink, who was professionally suspicious, wouldn’t be thinking about a little girl. Maude, maybe, but not Mary.

Hannebrink pursed his lips. “No evidence,” he said. “Maybe we picked up those punctures on the way over here. Maybe. It could have happened. Since I can’t prove it didn’t happen that way, I’m going to leave it alone. But if it ever happens here again, Mr. McGregor, someone is going to be very unhappy, and it won’t be me.”

“Why are you barking at me?” McGregor asked. “I was in the barn with you and your hooligans.” For once, he was telling the whole truth. It sounded no different from his lies.

Hannebrink didn’t answer. He waited while his men fixed the punctures, which they handled with practiced efficiency. Then all the Yank soldiers piled into the motorcars and drove off.

McGregor waited till they’d left his land. Then he walked into the house. His wife was furious. “They turned everything upside down and inside out, those dirty-” She hissed like a cat with its fur puffed out, then went on, “I wish I was a man, so I could say what I think.”

“Never mind,” McGregor said, which made Maude hiss again. Ignoring her, he went over to Mary. He knelt down and kissed her on the forehead. “This is for what you did, and for being clever enough to use a nail and not a knife.” Then he spanked her, hard enough to make her yelp in both surprise and pain. “And this is to remind you not to do it again, no matter how much you want to.”

His younger daughter stared. “How did you know it was me, Pa? You were inside the barn with the Yankees. You couldn’t see it.”

“How did I know? Because I’m your father, that’s how. This time, I’m proud of you, you little sneak. Some things you can only get away with once, though. This is one of them. Remember it.”

“Yes, Pa,” Mary said demurely, so demurely that McGregor could only hope she’d paid some attention-a little attention-to what he’d told her.

The big guns rumbled and roared. The bombardment of Nashville itself hadn’t stopped since the U.S. guns got close enough to reach the city. Lieutenant Colonel Irving Morrell had long since got used to that rumble from the western horizon.

Closer, but still west of his position on the northern bank of the Cumberland, another bombardment lay its thunder over the more distant rumble. For the past six days, U.S. artillery had been hammering the Confederate positions south of the river with high explosives and gas. Bombing aeroplanes had added the weight of their munitions to the unending gunfire. Fighting scouts swooped low, strafing the Rebel’s trenches with their machine guns.

General Custer could hardly have made it more obvious where he intended to throw First Army across the Cumberland. He had even been rash enough to let them get glimpses of the barrels he was gathering for his frontal blow.

And the Confederates, having such generosity bestowed upon them, were not slow to take advantage of it. Though the U.S. artillery hampered their movements, they brought reinforcements forward. Their own guns pounded away at the force Custer had assembled. Their aeroplanes were outnumbered, but still stung the U.S. soldiers waiting on Custer’s order to cross the river.

Irving Morrell looked west with benign approval.

Beside him, Colonel Ned Sherrard pulled out his watch. Morrell imitated the gesture. Together, they said, “Five minutes to go.”

Sherrard put his watch back into its pocket. He said, “How does it feel to have the whole First Army moving to a scheme you thought up?”

“Ask me in a few days,” Morrell answered. “If it goes the way I hope, it’ll feel great. If it doesn’t, I’ll be so low a deep dugout will look like up to me.”

As he watched the second hand of his own watch sweep into its final minutes before the curtain went up, he realized how much he had riding on the next few days. He would soon know the answer to a question so many men ask themselves: are you really as smart as you think you are? If he was, he’d be wearing a colonel’s eagles himself soon, or maybe even a brigadier general’s single stars. If he wasn’t, he’d be a lieutenant colonel if he stayed in the Army for the next fifty years, and no one would pay any attention to him during all that time.

Compared to failure, dying on the battlefield had its attractions.

“Fifteen sec-” he started to say, and then the guns behind him, the guns that had stayed hidden under canvas and branches, the guns that had remained silent for so long while their brethren pounded the Confederates to the west, opened up with everything they had against the thinned Rebel line just east of Lakewood, Tennessee. On the far side of the Cumberland, earth leapt and danced and quivered in agony.

A flight of bombers added their explosives to the attack, as they were doing farther west. Under the cover of the bombardment, Army engineers rushed to the bank of the Cumberland and began building half a dozen pontoon bridges across the river. Everything depended on the sappers. If they could get those bridges built fast enough, the rest of Morrell’s plan would unfold as he’d designed it. If they failed, he failed with them.

He wanted to stay and watch them work. He knew what was riding on their shoulders. Already a few of them had fallen, from machine-gun fire and from shells falling too near. The rest kept on. That was their job.

Colonel Sherrard reminded him of his job: “Into the barrel, Irv. As soon as those bridges get across, we go.” Sherrard shouted at the top of his lungs, right into Morrell’s ear. Morrell barely heard him. He thought about pretending he didn’t hear him so he could keep on watching the sappers, but knew Sherrard was right. He trotted off toward his barrel.

Like all the others waiting to cross the Cumberland, it had come here by night, to keep prying Rebel observation aeroplanes from spotting it. Like the artillery concentrated by similarly stealthy means, it had hidden under canvas since arriving. Now the canvas was off. The columns of barrels were ready to go forward if they could. And Irving Morrell’s would go first.

He nodded to the driver, reached down and slapped the right-side engineer on the back, and then, unable to bear being cooped up in this great iron box, opened the top hatch and stood up in the cupola. He had to watch the engineers at work. He had to watch the bridges snake across the Cumberland.

If one was wrecked, he could go with five. If two were wrecked, he could go with four. If three were wrecked, he had orders not to go, but thought he might disobey them. But all six bridges still pushed forward toward the southern bank of the spring-swollen river. General Custer’s ostentatious preparation had pulled the Confederate defenders closer to Nashville. Not many men, not many guns, were left to contest what would be the real crossing.

Riflemen and machine-gun crews in green-gray rushed to the ends of the extending bridges as they neared the far bank of the Cumberland. They started blazing away at the Confederates closest to the river, men who already risked their lives thanks to U.S. artillery fire.

A green flare-one of the bridges had reached the southern bank. A moment later, another one burned in the sky. The rest of the engineering crews worked like madmen. The sappers were as fiercely competitive as any soldiers God ever made. A third green flare blazed from the southern bank of the Cumberland.

Morrell ducked down into the cupola. “Fire ’em up!” he shouted. “We’re going.” The twin White truck engines bellowed to life. The iron deck, patterned to keep feet from slipping, shivered and rattled and shook under his boots. Maybe he was jumping the gun, but he didn’t think so. One of those last three bridges would surely succeed in making it across, and even if it didn’t…He stood up again, to stare across the Cumberland.

There! The fourth green flare. Now he could go with no reservations whatever. Some of the other barrel commanders were also standing up in their cupolas. He waved to them. They waved back. He’d also detailed a soldier with a hammer to run down each line of barrels and give the side of every machine in it a good, solid clang to signal that action was at hand.

More engines coughed and belched and caught. Even as Morrell stooped down into the cupola once more, the sixth and last green flare rose into the sky. He grinned. So far, everything was perfect. The way to keep it perfect was to push hard, never let the Confederates have a chance to build a defensive line of the sort they’d held so well for so long north of Nashville.

“Off balance,” he muttered to himself, not that anyone else in the barrel could have heard him even had he shouted. “Got to keep them off balance.” He pointed straight ahead, index finger extended. Forward.

Forward the barrel went, adding the clatter and rattle of the tracks to the engines’ flatulent roar. Morrell stood up again. The driver had his louvers open. He could see as much as he ever could, which wasn’t a great deal. But it was enough to let him get onto the bridge over which he would cross the Cumberland.

The bridge dipped and swayed a little under the weight of the barrel, but held. At the machine’s best pace-about that of a trotting soldier in full kit-it waddled over the bridge. Barrels also crossed on two more bridges. On the other three, infantry marched at double time.

A jolt, and the barrel clattered off the bridge and onto the soft dirt of the southern bank of the Cumberland. For a bad moment, Morrell thought the dirt would be soft enough to make the barrel bog down, but, engines screaming, the machine moved ahead, and onto ground better able to support its weight.

Machine-gun bullets clattered off the barrel’s armored carapace. The two left-hand machine guns returned fire. The Confederate gun fell silent. Maybe they’d knocked it out. Maybe its crew had been so busy shooting at the barrel, U.S. infantry were able to rush them. Morrell had seen that before: barrels were machine-gun magnets, attracting fire that might have been more profitably aimed against foot soldiers.

Now Morrell had the vision louvers down to slits. Through those slits, he saw Confederate soldiers moving forward now that the barrage had passed them by to punish targets farther behind the line. Halt, he signaled, and reached forward with a length of dowling to tap one of the artillerymen at the nose cannon on the shoulder.

They had no trouble figuring out the target he had in mind. The cannon snarled once, then again. The noise wasn’t too much worse than everything else going on inside the barrel. Through the slits, Morrell watched oncoming Rebs get flung aside as if they were paper dolls. The men in butternut who came through unhurt had to dive for cover.

Forward, Morrell signaled again. Forward they went, through the Confederate defensive system. The Rebs had a lot of trench lines, but not very many men in them. The barrel crews concentrated on wrecking machine-gun positions; those guns could tear the heart from an infantry attack, and had torn the heart from many. One after another, the barrels put them out of action.

Then, quite suddenly-or so it seemed-the barrels had traversed all the Confederate trenches, and reached the level ground behind them. A few C.S. artillery pieces were still firing. More had been pulled back and out of the pits from which they had shelled U.S. forces.

And quite a few were wrecked. Morrell’s traveling fortress rumbled past a quick-firing three-inch gun whose barrel had burst not far from the breech. U.S. shells had wrecked the carriage; most of the crew lay dead by the piece. At the end of the trail sat one of the gunners, his head in his hands, a picture of despair. His war was over. Soon the infantry advancing with the barrels would scoop him up.

Southwest, Morrell signaled. He stood up in the cupola again, to compare the field to the map he carried inside his head. If anything, what he saw looked better than what he had imagined and presented to General Custer.

“Open country!” he said exultantly. “We’ve got the Rebs out of their holes at last. They know how to fight from trenches, but now we’re playing a different game.”

There ahead, a railroad line ran toward Nashville. Along it chugged a train full of soldiers, the engineer blissfully unaware the United States Army had broken through. A cannon shell through the boiler brought him the news. Gleefully, the machine gunners in Morrell’s barrel raked the train.

Forward, he signaled again. He intended his thrust to cut off and outflank the Rebs who were defending Nashville from the rest of First Army. “Keep going,” he muttered. “We’ve got to keep going. You don’t get what you want by doing things halfway. I don’t want to scare these bastards. I want to wreck ’em.”

On rumbled the barrel. For the moment, the CSA seemed to have little with which to stop it.

Cassius tossed Scipio a Tredegar. Automatically, Scipio caught it out of the air. Automatically, he checked the chamber. It had a round in it. He pulled off the clip. By its weight, it was full.

“You is one o’ we, Kip,” Cassius said, and tossed him a couple of more ten-round boxes. “When we fights de feudal ’pressors, you fights wid we.”

The men of the Congaree Socialist Republic hadn’t trusted him with a rifle in his hands since he’d returned to the swamps by the river that gave the Republic its name. He looked around. “Cherry ain’t here,” he remarked.

Cassius’ expression turned sour. “She still huntin’ dat damnfool treasure Miss Anne never hid no kind of way.”

“She kin hunt till she git all old an’ shriveled up,” Scipio said. “If they ain’t nothin’ there, she ain’t gwine find it.”

“She keep huntin’, she don’ live to git all old an’ shriveled up,” Cassius answered. “Miss Anne, she put de militia round Marshlands. Dey catch Cherry an’ de poor fools she got with she.”

I hope they do, Cassius thought. Dear God, I hope they do. Cherry knew him for the cold heart, for the weak spirit, he was. She knew he had no true revolutionary fire in his belly, knew and despised him for it. If Anne Colleton caught her, Scipio would do nothing but rejoice.

In one pocket of his tattered dungarees, he had a letter addressed to Anne Colleton in St. Matthews. Getting hold of paper and pencil hadn’t been too hard. Even laying his hands on an envelope hadn’t been too hard. Finding a postage stamp, though…

Finally, he’d seen a dice game where one of the raiders was tearing stamps off a sheet a few at a time to cover his losses. Scipio had had almost no money in his own pockets, but he got down on one knee as fast as he could. Luck was with him; he’d rolled a seven his first try out and then made his point-it was four, which made it tougher-so that, before long, several small, red portraits of James Longstreet took up residence alongside his pocket change. One of them was on the envelope now.

Cassius said, “We’s gwine up to hit Gadsden a lick tonight. We ain’t done no fightin’ no’ th o’ the Congaree in a while. Them fat white bastards up there, they reckons they’s safe from de force o’ revolutionary justice. I aims to show they that they is mistooken.”

“You goes up there, you draws the militia up there after you,” Scipio said. “Not so many white sojers around Marshlands after dat. Cherry, she can dig all she like.”

“I knows it,” Cassius said. “Cain’t be helped.” He was by no means enamored of Cherry or her search for the treasure both he and Scipio were convinced did not exist. Then Cassius turned his gaze on Scipio. He still had a hunter’s eyes-or maybe they were sniper’s eyes. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to say anything. His expression spoke more plainly than words. Yes, you’ve got a rifle in your hands, it declared. You don’t dare use it against me or any of the other revolutionary fighters here. You’d have only one shot sent in the wrong direction, and then you’d be mine-because you and I both know that if that one shot is at me, you’ll miss. And I won’t.

Scipio sighed. He’d always been a halfhearted Red at best. He wasn’t even that any more. He was a man trapped in a nightmare with enemies on all sides and no way out. He saw no way to take Cassius with him when he fell, as he surely would fall. He did have hopes of bringing down Cherry-or, if Cherry got extraordinarily lucky, of bringing down Miss Anne. But Cassius? Cassius was a force of nature.

The force of nature joined Scipio and a couple of other men in a battered rowboat and glided north through the swamps of the Congaree. Several other boats followed. Cassius knew the ways through the maze of twisting channels. Starlight was all he needed. Each of the other boats carried at least one man who knew the swamps almost as well.

Something floated by overhead. Scipio’s blood ran cold. The part of his mind that the Colletons had spared no trouble or expense to educate insisted it was only an owl. The part of him that had grown up in one of those clapboard cabins a world away from the Marshlands mansion by which they sat said it was something worse, something ghostly, something that would lure them all into the heart of the swamp and never let them escape.

Then it hooted, and he felt foolish. More often than not, the educated part of his mind did have some notion of what it was talking about. But the other part was older, with roots that went down deeper. Education ruled his brain. His belly, his heart, his balls? No.

“Do Jesus!” one of the oarsmen said, his voice a shaky whisper. “I reckoned that were one o’ they bad hants, the kind that don’t never let you come out o’the swamp no more.” Scipio hadn’t been the only one frightened, then.

Cassius said, “Ain’t no hant can stand up against dialectical materialism.” His new beliefs had overpowered the older ones. Almost, Scipio envied him for that. Almost. Cassius’ new beliefs had overpowered his good judgment, too, and these tattered remnants of the Congaree Socialist Republic the Reds had hoped to establish were the proof of that.

Cassius did not, would not, see defeat, only a setback on the inevitable road to revolution. He could no more deny that inevitability than a devout Christian could the inevitability of the Second Coming.

Trees and bushes began to thin out as the boats full of Reds neared the edge of the swamp. Ahead, across fields once full of tobacco and cotton and rice that now held mostly weeds, the lights of Gadsden shone: a few houses bright with electricity, more showing the softer, yellower light of burning gas. Most of the houses showed no lights at all; most people, like most people all over the world, had to get up and go to work in the morning.

Cassius waved. The men at the oars brought the rowboat up against the bank of the creek that fed into the Congaree. It grounded softly on mud. The other boats came up alongside. Black men with rifles clambered out of them. “Let’s go, comrades,” Cassius said in a low but penetrating voice. “Time fo’ de buckra to learn some more o’de price de ’pressors pay.”

He left one man behind to guard the boats. Scipio wished he could have been that man, but knew better than to show it. The revolutionaries did not trust him enough to let him out of their sight. Cassius might have, but he did not try to override the opinion of the others. Since they were right and he wrong, that was as well for their cause, if not for Scipio’s.

A motorcar chugged along the road toward town. The driver never saw Cassius and his men, for he led them along paths he knew through the overgrown fields. They went past a couple of mansions, both dark and silent and deserted. Few great landowners around the Congaree dared live among the dozens of Negro servants and field hands needed to make a plantation and mansion live, not these days they didn’t.

Militiamen-the too old and the too young-stumped along the streets of Gadsden. One of them was rash enough to carry a kerosene lantern. Cassius let out a soft chuckle. “Look at that damnfool buckra goin’ roun’ like he a night watchman sayin’, ‘Twelve o’clock, an’ all’s well!’ It ain’t no twelve o’clock, an’ it ain’t well, neither.”

He raised his Tredegar to his shoulder in one fluid motion, aimed, and fired. The militiaman dropped the lantern with a shriek. The burning puddle of kerosene set fire to the boards of the sidewalk.

Another militiaman fired at the sound of Cassius’ shot, and perhaps at the muzzle flash. His bullet didn’t come close. Three Negroes fired at the flash from his rifle. He screamed, too; one of those rounds must have struck home. “Come on!” Cassius said. He advanced on Gadsden in long, loping, ground-eating strides.

Black shadows in the black night, the Reds ran after him. Scipio panted along with the rest, doing his best to keep up. The factory work he’d done had hardened him. He wasn’t the swiftest here, nor anywhere close to it, but he wasn’t the slowest, either.

A bell began clanging in the center of town: probably a fire alarm turned to a new purpose. Here and there, lights came on in upper stories as people got ready to come out and fight or simply tried to find out what was going on. The raiders fired whenever those lights gave them targets. More screams rose.

Slower than it should have came a cry that made sense: “Niggers! It’s the Red niggers!”

Militiamen and whoever else could lay hands on a rifle or shotgun or pistol started banging away, sometimes at the Negroes who ran through the streets but as often at one another. The townsfolk had not been raided for a while, and so did not put up the kind of energetic, organized defense the whites of St. Matthews, for instance, might have shown.

Scipio darted along Market Street toward the corner of Williams. A white-bearded militiaman dashed from Williams out onto Market just as Scipio got to the corner. They both stared in horror. Scipio shot first, before the old man’s rifle had quite come to bear on him. The militiaman fired as he fell. The bullet cracked past Scipio’s head.

Seeing the militiaman still trying to work the bolt on his rifle, Scipio shot him again, in the head. He didn’t move after that. He wasn’t the first white man Scipio had killed, but Scipio hadn’t wanted to shoot him. He’d got in the way; that was all. At the corner of Williams and Market stood a cast-iron mailbox. Scipio threw his note to Anne Colleton into it, then ran on.

The men of the Congaree Socialist Republic shot whomever they could shoot, started half a dozen fires, and then, at Cassius’ shouted command, melted away into the night. Some of the younger and more intrepid militiamen and townsfolk tried to pursue, but the Negroes knew where they were going and the whites did not. Escape proved easy enough.

“Don’t lose a man, not one!” Cassius exulted when they got back to the boats. “We tears that town to hell and gone”-he pointed back toward the leaping flames-“and we don’t lose a man. Is that a great raid, or is it ain’t?”

“That a great raid, Cass,” Scipio said solemnly. “A great raid.”