Breakthroughs

XVI

Colonel Irving Morrell stood up in the cupola of his barrel as it pounded through the rough and hilly country just north of Nolensville, Tennessee. He did that more and more often these days, and more and more of the commanders in the Barrel Brigade were imitating him. Some of them had stopped bullets. The rest were doing a better job of fighting their machines.

He grinned. He had a toy the other fellows didn’t, or most of them didn’t, anyhow. When First Army infantry got light machine guns to give them extra firepower as they advanced, he’d commandeered one and had a welder mount the tripod in front of the hatch through which he emerged. When the Rebels shot at him now, he shot back.

They were shooting. They’d been shooting, hard, ever since the drive on Murfreesboro opened two days before. But First Army had already come better than ten miles, and the advance wasn’t slowing down. If anything, the barrels were doing better today than they had the day before.

A bullet ricocheted off the front of the barrel. Just one round-that meant a rifleman. A moment later, another one snapped past Morrell’s head. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a ferocious grin. He’d spotted the muzzle flash from the middle of a clump of bushes. He swung his own-his very own-light machine gun toward the bushes and ripped off a burst. No one shot at the barrel from that direction again.

“We’ve got them!” he said. Once, playing chess, he’d seen ten moves ahead: a knight’s tour that threatened several of his opponent’s pieces on the way to forking the fellow’s king and rook. It had been an epiphany of sorts, a glimpse into a higher world. He was at best a medium-good player; he’d never known such a moment before or since…till now.

He’d had a taste of that feeling when First Army crossed the Cumberland. This was different, though. This was better. There, the Confederates had been fooled. Here, they were doing everything they could do, as the soldier across the chessboard from him had done everything he could do-and they were losing anyhow.

They did not have enough men. They did not have enough aeroplanes. No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a U.S. fighting scout zoomed past the waddling barrel. Morrell waved, though the pilot was gone by then. He almost wished it had been a Confederate aeroplane; he longed to try out the light machine gun as an antiaircraft weapon and give some Reb a nasty surprise.

The Confederate States did not have enough barrels, either, nor fully understand what to do with the ones they had. Every so often, a few of their rhomboids would come forward to challenge the U.S. machines. Individually, theirs were about as good as the one Morrell commanded. But what he and Ned Sherrard and General Custer had grasped and the Confederates had not was that, with barrels, the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. A mass of them all striking together could do things the same number could not do if committed piecemeal.

A shell whine in the air sent Morrell ducking back inside his steel turtle’s shell. Even as he ducked, a shell burst close to the barrel. Fragments hissed past him and clattered off its plating. None bit his soft, tender, vulnerable flesh, though.

More shells burst close by. A battery of C.S. three-inchers was doing its best to knock out his barrel and any others close by. Except at very short range, field guns hit barrels only by luck, but the hail of splinters from the barrage forced Morrell to stay inside for a while.

It was like dying and going to hell, except a little hotter and a little stickier. July in Tennessee was not the ideal weather in which to fight in a barrel. The ideal weather, for men if not for engines, would have been January in Labrador. The barrel generated plenty of heat on its own. When its shell trapped still more…Morrell was coming to understand how a rib roast felt in the oven.

And the rest of the crew suffered worse than he did. When he stood up, he got a breeze in his face: a hot, muggy breeze, but a breeze even so. They got only the whispers of air that sneaked in through louvered vision slits and the mountings of the cannon and machine guns. The engineers, down below Morrell in the bowels of the barrel, got no air at all, only stinking fumes from the twin truck engines that kept the traveling fortress traveling.

Morrell stood up again. Shells were still falling, but not so close. There was Nolensville, only a few hundred yards ahead. Infantrymen and machine-gun crews were firing from the houses and from barricades in the street, as they did in every little town. As Morrell watched, a shell from the cannon of another U.S. barrel sent chunks of a barricade flying in all directions. A moment later, that barrel started to burn. Soldiers leaped from it. Morrell hoped they got out all right. He sprayed a few rounds in front of them to make the defenders keep their heads down.

Infantrymen in green-gray and barrels converged on Nolensville. U.S. aeroplanes strafed the Confederates in the town from just above chimney height. Morrell did not order his barrel into Nolensville, where it might easily come to grief moving along any of the narrow, winding streets. He poured machine-gun fire and cannon shells onto the Rebels from just outside, where the barrel could move as freely as…a barrel could move.

Some of the defenders died in Nolensville. Some, seeing they could not hold the town, broke and ran. Morrell’s barrel rumbled past Nolensville. He took potshots at fleeing men in butternut, some white, some colored. Some of them, probably, had been brave for a long time. Under endless hammering, though, even the hardest broke in time.

Another Confederate came out from behind a large, dun-colored rock. Morrell swung the light machine gun toward him. He was on the point of opening fire when he saw the man was holding a flag of truce.

Bullets from one of the barrel’s hull machine guns stitched the ground near the Confederate officer’s feet. He stood still and let the flag be seen. The machine gun stopped firing. All over the field, firing slowed to a spatter and stopped.

Morrell ducked down into the cupola. Halt, he signaled urgently. Then, like a jack-in-the-box, he popped up again. Even before the barrel had fully stopped, he scrambled down off it and ran toward the Confederate with the white flag. “Sir, I am Colonel Irving Morrell, U.S. Army. How may I be of service to you?”

Courteously, the Rebel, an older man, returned the salute. The three stars on each side of his stand collar showed his rank matched Morrell’s. “Harley Landis,” he said. He said nothing after that for close to half a minute; Morrell saw tears shine in his eyes. Then, gathering himself, he resumed: “Colonel, I–I am ordered to seek from the U.S. Army the terms you will require for a cease-fire, our own forces having proved unable to offer effectual resistance any longer.”

Joy blazed in Morrell. To let his opposite number see it would have been an insult. Sticking to business would not. “How long a cease-fire do you request, sir, and on how broad a front?”

“A cease-fire of indefinite duration, along all the front now being defended by the Army of Kentucky,” Landis answered. Again, he seemed to have trouble finding words. At last, he did: “I hope you will forgive me, sir, but I find this duty particularly difficult, as I was born and reared outside Louisville.”

“You have my sympathies, for whatever they may be worth to you,” Morrell said formally. “You must understand, of course, that I lack the authority to grant a cease-fire of any such scope. I will pass you back to First Army headquarters, which will be in touch with our War Department. I can undertake to say that troops under my command will observe the cease-fire for so long as they are not fired upon, and so long as they do not discover C.S. troops improving their positions or reinforcing-or, of course, unless I am ordered to resume combat.”

“That is acceptable,” Colonel Landis said.

“A question, if I may,” Morrell said, and the Confederate officer nodded. Morrell asked, “Are the Confederate States requesting a cease-fire along the whole front, from Virginia to Sonora?”

“As I understand it, no, not at the present time,” Harley Landis replied.

Morrell frowned. “I hope you see that the United States may find it difficult to cease fighting along one part of the front while continuing in another?”

“Way I learned it, fighting in the War of Secession went on a while longer out here than it did back East, on account of the United States kept trying to hold on to Kentucky,” Landis said.

That was true. Whether it made a binding precedent was another question. Morrell shrugged. “Again, that’s not for me to say, sir. Let’s head back toward Nashville till I can flag down a motorcar and put you in it. The sooner the fighting does stop, the better for both our countries.”

“Yes, sir. That’s a fact.” As Landis stalked past the barrel from which Morrell had emerged, he glowered in its direction. “You Yankees hadn’t built these damn things in carload lots, we’d have whipped you again.”

“I don’t know,” Morrell said. “We’d stopped you before we began using them. Breaking your lines would have been a lot harder without them, though; I will say that.” Landis didn’t answer. He kept on glaring. But he kept on walking, too, north and west toward Nashville and First Army headquarters. The white flag in his hand fluttered in the breeze.

Every soldier in green-gray who saw the Confederate officer inside U.S. lines with a flag of truce stared and stared, then burst into cheers. Off in the distance, gunfire still rattled here and there. It fell silent, one pocket after another. The Rebels had to be sending more men forward under flag of truce to let U.S. forces know they were seeking a cease-fire.

Before Morrell spotted a motorcar, he found something even better: a mobile field-telephone station, the men still laying down wire after them as their wagon tried to keep up with the advance. “Can you put me through to Nashville?” he demanded of them. They nodded, eyes wide with wonder as they too gaped at Harley Landis and the flag he bore. Morrell said, “Then do it.”

They did. In a few minutes, Morrell and General Custer’s adjutant were shouting back and forth at each other through the hisses and pops and scratching noises that made field telephones such a trial to use. “They want what, Colonel?” Major Abner Dowling bawled.

“A cease-fire on this front,” Morrell shouted back.

“On this front? This front only?” Dowling asked.

“That’s what Colonel Landis says,” Morrell answered.

“The general commanding won’t like that,” Dowling predicted. “Neither will the War Department, and neither will the president.”

“I think you’re right, Major,” Morrell said. “Shall I turn him back?” He watched Landis’ face. At those words, the Rebel officer looked like a man who’d taken a bayonet in the guts.

At the same time, Dowling was shouting, “Good God, no! Send him on! If they give so much without being pushed, we’ll get more when we squeeze, I wager. And come yourself, too. Only fitting you should be in at the death.”

“Thank you, sir,” Morrell said, and hung up. He turned to Colonel Harley Landis. “They will be waiting for you, sir. If I had to make a prediction, though, I would say they will not find acceptable a proposal for a cease-fire on one front only.”

“Sir, I have my orders, as you have yours,” Landis replied, to which Morrell could only nod.

A Ford came picking its way up the battered road toward the front. Morrell gave a peremptory wave. The courier who had been in the automobile soon found himself on shank’s mare, while the Ford turned around and carried Landis and Morrell back through the wreckage of war toward Nashville.

Boston was going out of its mind. The trolleyman kept ringing his bell, but inside the trolley Sylvia Enos could hardly hear it through the din of automobile and truck horns, wagon bells, church bells, steam whistles, and shouting, screaming people. The trolley had a devil of a time going forward, for people were literally dancing in the streets.

“Rebs ask for cease-fire!” newsboys shouted at every other streetcorner. They were mobbed. “Rebs ask for peace!” newsboys shouted at the corners where the Rebs weren’t shouting for a cease-fire. They were mobbed, too. Sylvia watched a fistfight break out as two men struggled over one paper.

Mostly, though, joy reigned supreme. Only the oldest granddads and grandmas remembered the last time the United States had beaten a foreign foe. Sylvia saw more men and women kissing and hugging in public during that slow streetcar ride to the shoe factory than she had in her life before.

A man got on the trolley drunk as a lord before eight o’clock in the morning. He kissed two women who seemed glad to kiss him back, then tried to kiss Sylvia, too. “No,” she said angrily, and pushed him away. He might have fallen over, but the trolley was too crowded to let him. “The war’s not over yet,” Sylvia told him and whoever else might listen. As far as she was concerned, the newsboys shouting Peace! were out of their minds.

As far as the drunk was concerned, Sylvia was out of her mind. His mouth fell open, giving her another blast of gin fumes. “Of course”-it came out coursh-“the war’s over,” he said. “Rebs’re quitting, ain’t they?”

She’d already read the Globe. She hadn’t just listened to the boys yelling their heads off. “No,” she answered. “They haven’t surrendered, and there’s still fighting in places. And the Canadians haven’t quit fighting anywhere, and neither has England.” And George was out there somewhere in the Atlantic, and no indeed, the Royal Navy had not quit fighting, and nobody’d said anything about the Confederate Navy quitting, either.

“So what?” the drunk said. “We’ll lick ’em. We’ll lick all them bastards.” He paused and leered. “Now how about a kiss?”

Sylvia wondered if she would have to use a knee in a most unladylike fashion. Her expression, though, must have been fierce enough to get the message across even to a lush. He turned away, muttering things she was probably lucky not to be able to understand.

She also wondered if she was the only person anywhere in the United States not convinced all the shooting was over as of this moment. By all appearances, she was the only person on the streetcar who thought that way. People avoided her and patted the drunk on the back. One of the women he’d kissed now kissed him in turn. She didn’t look like a slattern. She looked like a schoolteacher.

At last, after fighting its way through endless traffic jams, the trolley got to Sylvia’s stop. Two more men, one drunk, one sober, tried to kiss her before she got to the shoe factory. She dodged the drunk and stepped on the sober man’s foot, hard. He hopped and cursed and cursed and hopped. She hurried to work.

She clocked in almost twenty minutes late. When she went in from the front hall where the time clock stood to the great cave of a room where she worked, she expected the foreman to descend on her with fire in his eye. Despite being only an inch or so taller than she was, despite a snowy mustache, Gustav Krafft was not a man to trifle with.

But he only nodded and said a guttural “Good morning” as she went to her sewing machine. A good third of the workers hadn’t yet made it to the factory. Sylvia let out a silent sigh of relief.

Women and more little old men drifted in as the morning wore along. Some of them, like the drunk on the trolley, were visibly the worse for wear. Sylvia would not have wanted to come to work that way, not when she was working at a machine that could bite if she was careless. She sewed pieces of upper together and tossed them into a box. When it got full, a feebleminded young man carried it away to the workers who would join uppers to soles.

Halfway through the morning, one of the men who looked as if he’d been born at his sewing machine let out a horrible yell and held up a hand that poured blood. Gustav Krafft dashed to his aid at a speed that belied the foreman’s years. “Ach, Max, Dummkopf!” he shouted, and then a spate of German Sylvia could not understand at all.

After wrapping his own handkerchief around the wound, Krafft led Max out of the chamber toward first aid. The worker was still yelling, and emitting hot-sounding gutturals of his own between yells.

Sylvia turned to the woman at the sewing machine next to hers and said, “I wouldn’t have thought he’d be one who let himself get hurt.”

“Neither would I. Max has been here since this place opened up, I hear,” replied the other woman, whose name was Emma Kilgore. She was plump, a few years older than Sylvia, and had curly hair two shades darker than a carrot. “It’s the war news-everybody’s going crazy now that things are over.”

“But they aren’t,” Sylvia protested. “There’s still fighting, and plenty of it.”

“My husband’s down in that Tennessee place,” Emma said. “As long as they aren’t shooting at Jack, the war’s over as far as I’m concerned.”

“George is in the Navy, out in the Atlantic,” Sylvia said. “It’s not over for him, not by a long shot, and that means it’s not over for me, either.”

“That’s a tough one, dearie.” Emma’s sympathy was real but perfunctory. As she’d said, her own worries were gone. Few people, Sylvia had seen, really cared about the troubles of others unless they shared them.

Gustav Krafft came back into the cavernous room. Max’s blood stained the front and side of his shirt. He looked around, saw how many machines weren’t working, and scowled fiercely. “Even if the war is over, the work is not,” he said. “The devil loves idle hands. I do not.”

“If you loved milk, it’d curdle,” Emma Kilgore muttered. Sylvia let out a strangled snort of laughter, but her head was bent over her machine, which was snarling before Krafft’s eyes could pick out from whom the sound had come. The foreman’s gaze swept on. Sylvia laughed again, this time silently. She felt as if she’d been naughty in class and got away with it.

In a couple of hours, Max came back, his hand wrapped in bandages that had turned red here and there. “He’s crazy,” Emma Kilgore whispered.

“Maybe he needs the money,” Sylvia whispered back.

Emma shook her head, which made those copper curls fly about. “I hear tell he owns an apartment house, and I know for a fact he’s got one son who’s a cop and another one who’s a cabinetmaker. He ain’t broke.”

As if to offer his own explanation, Max said, “It is not the first time the machine gets its teeth in me. It is probably not the last, either.” He sat down and went back to work. Now that he was paying attention to what he was doing, he was more deft with one good hand and one bandaged than Sylvia could dream of being with both of hers. But an absentminded moment had given him a nasty wound.

Krafft came over, thumped Max on his bent back, and said something to him in German. He answered in the same language. The foreman thumped him again, careful not to disturb him while he was guiding leather under the needle. Then Krafft spoke in English: “Max says he is like the United States. He has been hurt many times, but he wins at the last.”

Several people clapped their hands: on this day of all days, patriotic sentiment won applause. Sylvia kept right on working, with doggedness similar in kind if not in degree to that which Max showed. Emma muttered, “Christ, he didn’t cut his hand off.” Her patriotism, plainly, was limited to getting her husband back in one piece. Sylvia was ready to settle for having George home safe, too.

She clocked out as slowly as she could after the closing whistle blew, to make up a couple of the minutes she’d lost in the morning because the trolley hadn’t got her to work on time. It was late coming to pick her up, too. The celebration on the streets of Boston hadn’t slowed down since she’d last seen it. If anything, crowds were thicker, louder, and better lubricated than they had been earlier in the day.

When at last she got to George, Jr.’s, school, she found it festooned with red, white, and blue bunting. George, Jr., came pelting over to greet her when she stuck her head into his room. “We won, Ma!” he shouted. “We licked the dirty Rebels, and that means Pa can come home!” He jumped up and down in excitement.

“I wish it was that simple,” she answered. “Your father’s not home yet, and I don’t know when he’s going to be. For that matter, we’re not home yet, and I don’t know when we’re going to be, either. We still have to get your sister, and everything’s a little crazy today.”

“We won!” George, Jr., repeated. He wasn’t old enough to know any better. But plenty of people who were old enough to know better were saying the same thing.

Sylvia led George, Jr., up to Mrs. Dooley’s to get his little sister more than half an hour late. She resigned herself to another lecture from the woman about tardiness. But Mrs. Dooley opened the door with a smile on her face. She smelled of what Sylvia recognized after a moment as cooking sherry. “Hello, Mrs. Enos,” she said. “Isn’t it a grand and glorious time to be alive?”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” Sylvia said. “I am sorry I’m late. Everyone seems to be in the streets today.”

“Nobody will blame anybody for anything today,” Mrs. Dooley said. She turned. “Mary Jane, your mother is here.” By the noises from within, Mary Jane wasn’t the only child whose mother was late today.

When she came around Mrs. Dooley’s billowing black skirt, she chirped, “We won the war, Mama!”

“Well, we’re certainly winning,” Sylvia said. That let her state her own opinion without sounding too much as if she was disagreeing with what seemed to be the whole world but for her. “Now we, the three of us, need to go home.” There was an opinion on which she would put up with no disagreement at all.

They were late getting home, too, of course, which meant they had a late supper. The children were too excited to want to go to bed when they should. Sylvia had known they would be. At last, she got them settled. Then she had to settle herself, too. The trouble she had going to sleep made her wonder whether, down deep, she was exulting over victory, too.

Lieutenant Brearley stowed the code book in the locked drawer and turned the key. “Here’s what it means, sir,” he said, handing the decoded wireless message to Roger Kimball. “It’s-important.”

“Give it here,” the commander of the Bonefish said. “I’ll decide how important it is.” He wished the exec hadn’t said anything to draw the crew’s attention to the message. Sailors were curious enough without encouragement.

He unfolded the paper, read it, and then read it again to make sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. It still said the same thing the second time: SEEKING CEASE-FIRE ON LAND. END OFFENSIVE ACTIVITY. IF ATTACKED, DEFEND SELF. ACKNOWLEDGE RECEIPT.

“You’re sure you decoded it right?” he demanded of Brearley.

“Yes, sir,” the executive officer said. “Here are the groups they sent.” He made as if to open the drawer again and get out the code book.

“Never mind,” Kimball said wearily. “I believe you. I believe it. We were getting hammered the last time the Bonefish went into port. It’s just that…aah, God damn it to hell.” His left hand closed into a fist and struck his left thigh, hard enough to hurt. Then, slowly and deliberately, he tore the message into tiny, indecipherable shreds and threw them away.

“What do we do, sir?” Brearley asked.

“We acknowledge receipt, as ordered,” Kimball said. “Then we keep right on with the patrol. We weren’t ordered to hold in place. I don’t see a surrender order or anything like it, do you?”

“Well, no, sir, not when you put it like that,” Brearley admitted. He looked even unhappier than he had already. “I wish they’d have told us more, so we’d have a better idea of what we’re supposed to do.”

Kimball reveled in commanding a submersible not least because the Navy Department had very few chances to tell him what to do. “The more code groups they send, the better the odds the damnyankees’ll figure out what they mean,” he answered. “Now, you get clicking on the wireless telegraph and acknowledge that we got that order.” He lowered his voice but raised the intensity in it: “And for God’s sake keep your mouth shut afterwards. I don’t want the crew to hear one word about what kind of shape the country’s in. You got that, Tom?”

“Yes, sir,” Brearley answered, and then, “Aye aye, sir,” to show he not only understood but would willingly obey.

Gloomily, Kendall climbed back up to the conning tower and peered out over the Atlantic. It was a hell of a big place. As far as he could tell, the Bonefish might have been alone in the middle of it. If he spotted no plumes on the horizon, he didn’t have to worry about following the order from the Navy Department.

But he wanted to spot a smoke plume, there on the edge of visibility. He wanted to send more Yankee ships to the bottom, the same way a hunting dog wanted to tree a possum or a coon. It was what he’d been trained to do, and it was what he enjoyed doing. And, he knew without false modesty, he was damn good at it.

As he raised the binoculars to his eyes, he knew the secret wouldn’t keep forever. It probably wouldn’t even keep very long. He wished he could blame Brearley for calling him down from the conning tower to read the decoded message, but he couldn’t. It was too important to allow delay. The crew would already be wondering what it was all about, though. One way or another, they’d learn, too. Somehow or other, they always did.

And what would they do then? Would they cause trouble, saying peace was at hand and they didn’t want to fight any more? Or would they want to keep fighting no matter what happened on land? They hadn’t lost the war, regardless of the failures of the fools in butternut.

“Miserable bastards,” Kimball muttered, meaning the soldiers, not the crew of the Bonefish. But then a long, grim sigh burst from his lungs, followed by more muttering: “Shit, it doesn’t hardly matter anyhow, not with Brazil in the war on the wrong side.”

With the Empire of Brazil in the war on the wrong side, all the shipping routes from Argentina that had kept England fed for so long didn’t work any more. And with France out of the fight across the Atlantic, the German High Seas Fleet was liable to pick off any freighters the U.S. Navy missed.

In that case, why go on fighting? he wondered. The only answer he could come up with was that the C.S. Navy, though battered, did remain unbeaten. As long as he could strike a blow against the enemies of his country, he would do it.

He scanned the horizon, turning slowly through 360 degrees. Nothing. And then, as he’d learned to do in the past few weeks, he scanned the rest of the heavens, too. Any aeroplane he spotted through his field glasses would belong to the United States.

Experience paid off, as experience has a way of doing. The aeroplane was too far away for him to hear its engine. Without the binoculars, he might not have seen it at all, or might have taken it for a distant soaring albatross. He started to scramble down the hatch and order a quick dive, then made himself watch and wait. If the aeroplane came closer, he would dive before it could drop a bomb on the Bonefish. If it didn’t, if it turned away…

Slowly, he smiled. If it turned away, it would be turning away for a reason, or he hoped it would. Sure enough, a minute later the moving speck swung off toward the north. Looking more satisfied than he had any business being, given the state of the war and the state of his orders, Kimball paced the steel roof of the conning tower. The aeroplane had spotted the Bonefish. He was sure of that; it wouldn’t have changed course so abruptly if it hadn’t. And Kimball didn’t think the pilot thought anyone on the Bonefish had noticed him. No reason he should. Nothing aboard the submersible had changed while he looked it over.

Kimball kept watching the whole round of the horizon. He would have been a fool to do otherwise, and he had not stayed alive for almost three years in a submarine by being a fool. But he would also have been a fool not to pay particularly close attention to the north. When not one but three smoke plumes came into view, he nodded to himself. He waited till he was sure the ships were destroyers, then waited a little more. Let them think he was a little on the slow side.

Then he did go back down into the fetid steel tube that was the Bonefish, the real Bonefish, dogging the hatch after him as he did. “Take her down to periscope depth,” he called to the crew. “We’ve got some damnyankees coming to pay us a call.”

They were coming hard, too, in the hopes of sending the Bonefish to the bottom. Kimball had loitered on the surface a good deal longer than he would have otherwise, to make them think he’d be easy pickings. He slid toward them at five knots, easing the periscope above the surface every minute or two to keep an eye on them.

Ben Coulter spoke quietly: “Beg your pardon, sir, but we ain’t headin’ toward those sons of bitches so as we can surrender, are we?”

“Hell, no,” Kimball answered, hiding how appalled he was at the speed with which rumor spread. “You ever hear of submerging before you give up?”

“No, sir,” the veteran petty officer answered. “I never heard of any such thing, and I’m damn glad of it.” He went back to his post.

“Sir, our orders-” Tom Brearley began.

Kimball silenced him with a glare. “I am obeying our orders, Mr. Brearley,” he snapped. “Now you see that you obey mine.” Brearley bit his lip and nodded.

One of the trio of destroyers went straight for the spot where they’d seen the Bonefish. One went to the southeast of that spot, one to the southwest. Coulter let out a quiet chuckle when Kimball relayed that news. “They reckon we’re runnin’ away, don’t they, sir?”

“That’s how it looks to me,” Kimball said. He let out a sigh that might have been annoyance. “All these years of fighting somebody, and they don’t know him at all. I bet they don’t know who’s screwing their wives, either.” In the dim lamplight, his sailors grinned at him.

Just for a moment, he wondered if anybody was screwing Anne Colleton right now. If anybody was, he’d never find out about it, not unless she wanted him to. There in the middle of the stinking steel tube, he nodded respectfully. Say what you would, that was a woman with balls.

Splash! The sound was very clear inside the pressure hull: a depth charge flying into the Atlantic, followed by several more at short intervals. They were still splashing into the sea when the first one exploded. As best Kimball could judge, it had been set to burst deep.

He turned to his executive officer. “I’d say we are being attacked,” he remarked. Brearley nodded; a depth charge was not the prelude to an invitation to tea. Grinning, Kimball said, “And now, by Jesus, I aim to defend myself.”

“Yes, sir,” the exec said. Tom wasn’t stupid; after a while, he was liable to wonder whether his skipper had dawdled on the surface on purpose, to provoke the damnyankees into attacking the Bonefish. But that would be later. For now, they had a fight on their hands.

Kimball crept closer to the nearest destroyer. Watching ash cans flying off her stern, he grinned again. “Yeah, keep it up,” he muttered. “Good luck with your damn hydrophones while you’re throwing those babies around.” He ordered the two forward tubes flooded; an exploding depth charge covered the noise of inrushing water. Then it was just a matter of sliding in to within eight hundred yards and shooting the fish.

The destroyer had barely started an evasive maneuver when the first torpedo hit her amidships. A moment later, the second struck the stern. With two fish in her, the destroyer shuddered to a stop and began to sink. The other two U.S. warships turned in the direction of their stricken comrade, and in the direction from which the Bonefish had launched the torpedoes.

“Dive deep and evade, sir?” Brearley asked.

“Hell, no,” Kimball answered. “That’s what they’ll be looking for me to do. I want an approach at periscope depth-but only at four knots, because I want to save the batteries as much as I can. I don’t aim to come up for air till after sunset, when the ships and the aeroplanes can’t spy me.”

He got a good shot at one of the two Yankee destroyers, but her skipper turned tight into the path of the fish, and it sped past her bow. After that, it was the surface ships’ turn. Kimball still refused to dive deep, but staying at periscope depth, where his boat might be spotted from the surface-and from overhead, if that damned aeroplane was buzzing around again-was too foolhardy even for him to contemplate. By the time he’d sneaked far enough away from the depth charges that sent endlessly repeated thunder through the boat to take another look with the periscope, he was too far away to fire off any more fish.

“Well, we hurt ’em,” he said in no small satisfaction. “If they think we’re giving up and going home, they can damn well think again.”

That had a salutary effect on the sailors. Rumors of a surrender would be a lot harder to believe now. Kimball noticed Tom Brearley watching him, there in the orange-lit, stinking gloom. He grinned at his exec: a tiger’s smile, or a hammerhead’s. Brearley stayed sober. He was drawing his own conclusions, all right. Too damn bad, Kimball thought. I don’t aim to quit till I have to-and maybe not then.

Captain Jonathan Moss had flown over Lake Ontario in the early days of the war, when the U.S. Army was slowly-so slowly-battering its way through one fortified belt on the Niagara Peninsula after another. Now here he was again, flying down from the northwest instead of up from the south. As it had then, Archie from Canadian guns filled the sky around his aeroplane with puffs of black smoke. The Wright-built Albatros copy bucked in the turbulence of near misses.

Now, though, the antiaircraft fire came from inside Toronto, from the city the United States had confidently thought they would overrun in a few short weeks. Moss’ grimace had only a little to do with the wind tearing at his face. “Nothing in this damn campaign has gone the way it should,” he muttered.

He’d said the same thing out loud-sometimes drunkenly loud-with his flightmates and in the officers’ club. Seeing the slate-blue water of the lake below him brought it to mind again. Nothing in Lake Ontario had gone as it should have, either. Even at the start of the war, a man could probably have walked from shore to shore on the mines laid there. Along with them, the Canucks’ submersibles had meant U.S. Great Lakes battleships-they would have been coast-defense ships on the ocean-hadn’t done a quarter of what they were supposed to.

Down below him, thunder of a different sort roared, along with huge tongues of fire and clouds of gray smoke. The Canadian Navy still had a couple of Great Lakes battleships in working order behind their mine fields; the ships, these days, were earning their keep by pouring shells from their big guns onto the U.S. infantrymen pushing their way into Toronto.

“Let’s see how you like this,” Moss said, diving on the behemoth below. Percy Stone, Pete Bradley, and Charley Sprague, who had replaced unlucky Hans Oppenheim on the flight, followed him down.

He wished he were carrying a bomb fixed to his landing gear, so he could hope to do some real damage to the armored warship below, but consoled himself by remembering that real bombers hadn’t been able to sink her, either. He’d do what he could, that was all.

Men scurried on the deck of the Great Lakes battleship. It carried its own Archie: guns very much like those used on land. They started hammering away at him. So did machine guns, the long spurts of flame from their muzzles very different from the intermittent flashes from the antiaircraft guns proper.

His thumb came down on the firing button on top of the stick. The twin machine guns atop the engine chattered into life. He raked the deck from bow to stern, buzzing along no higher than the warship’s stack. He was past the ship before he could see how much damage he’d done-but not before a couple of machine-gun bullets pierced the fabric covering his fighting scout.

He clawed for altitude; if any enemy aeroplanes had spotted his dive, they’d be stooping on him like so many falcons. As he did, he also swung back toward the Great Lakes battleship for another run. His flightmates formed in line behind him. They’d come safe through the heavy antiaircraft fire, too, then.

Sailors were dragging wounded or dead men to shelter. “Give up, you stupid bastards,” Moss growled. “You and the limeys are the only ones left fighting, and you can’t last long.”

Strictly speaking, that wasn’t true. Out in the Pacific, the Japanese had given as good as they’d got. But that part of the war was a sideshow for the United States. Down below Jonathan Moss, Toronto lay at its bleeding heart.

As he started his second pass at the Canadian warship, he thought of Laura Secord, back on her farm near Arthur. Had her ancestor not imitated Paul Revere, Toronto might have belonged to the USA for the past hundred years and then some. He shook his head. If he got to worry about what might have been, he was liable not to worry enough about what was going on, and to lose the chance to worry about what would go on in the future.

A hail of bullets and shells greeted him when he went into that second dive. He fired back. The sailors on deck were a stationary target, and he wasn’t. There were a lot of them, too, and only one of him. They didn’t do him any harm. He hoped he hurt them.

The Great Lakes battleship almost shot him down without meaning to. The big guns roared out another broadside, the shells aimed at foot soldiers far away. But blast sent Moss’ flying scout flipping through the air. He had only moments to straighten out before he ended up in Lake Ontario. Shouting curses he hardly even noticed, he fought for control and won it just in time.

Anxiously, he looked back for Stone and Bradley and Sprague, wondering if the warship’s main armament had accidentally done what the antiaircraft guns could not do on purpose. To his relief, he spied all three of them. He also saw that he was beginning to run low on fuel, and was not in the least sorry to discover it. When he waved back toward the aerodrome by Orangeville, his flightmates followed his lead with what seemed like relief of their own.

They were up above ten thousand feet by the time they crossed the front line just outside of Toronto. That didn’t stop the Canucks and limeys from blazing away at them, nor did it keep some overeager idiots on the American side of the line from sending some Archie their way. Fortunately, the U.S. gunners were no better at what they did than their counterparts on the other side.

Moss bumped his fighting scout to a stop on the rutted grass landing strip outside the little Ontario town. As usual, the groundcrew men clucked at the fine assortment of punctures he’d picked up. “The idea, sir, is to fly an aeroplane, not a patchwork quilt,” Herm said.

“As long as they don’t puncture me or the motor, I’m not going to worry about it,” Moss said.

“Well, well.” Charley Sprague came up to him as he was descending from the cockpit to the ground. “That’s not the sort of instruction you can get in flying school, is it, sir?” Sprague was tall and lean and good-looking, with expressive eyebrows and a Kaiser Bill mustache waxed to a pointed perfection not even the slipstream could ruffle. He had the indefinable manner of coming from a moneyed family.

“Not more than once,” Moss answered, which made Sprague break into a wide grin. More seriously, Moss went on, “After that, the War Department sends your family a wire they’d sooner not have.”

“After what?” Percy Stone asked, his goggles pushed up on top of his head. “After you strafe a Great Lakes battleship? I bet they do. The only thing I can think of that was less fun was when I got shot.”

“Actually, I was thinking of after you train to strafe a Great Lakes battleship,” Moss said.

Stone considered that, then nodded. “You’ve got something there. I knew about as many people who got killed learning as I did fliers who went down against the enemy. Nobody ever talks about it, but it’s true.”

Charley Sprague nodded. “You’re right about that, sir,” he said: even in brief acquaintance, Moss had seen that he punctiliously observed the rules of military courtesy. “I saw half a dozen fellows die while I was learning the game. Some of them were better fliers than I was, but they thought they were better than they were, too, if you know what I mean. And some fell out of the sky for no reason anyone could see.” He spread his hands. “ ‘Time and chance happeneth to them all,’ is what the Bible says about that.”

Last of the flight, Pete Bradley came up in time to hear Sprague’s last couple of sentences. “Ain’t it the truth?” he said, a sentence unscriptural but most sincere. “When your number’s up, it’s up, that’s all.” He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “I thought all our numbers were up when we made the second run at that damn boat.”

“Worst of it is, they can go right on mounting more machine guns on it, too,” Moss said. “Pretty soon strafing it will be suicide, nothing else.”

“Have to bomb at high altitude, then,” Lieutenant Sprague said. “We’ll need better bombsights for that; we couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with the ones we have now. And the bombers will need more guns, to hold off the foe’s fighting scouts. Regular flying fortresses, that’s what they’ll have to be.”

Moss looked at him in admiration. “You’ve got all the angles figured, don’t you, Charley? Sounds like you’re ready for the next war right now.”

“Poppycock!” Sprague said. “What wants doing is plain enough-plain as the nose on my face, which is saying something.” He touched the member in question, which, though long and thin, was not outstandingly so. “How to get from where we are to where we need to be: ay, there’s the rub.”

“That’s Shakespeare,” Percy Stone said, and Sprague nodded. Stone slapped him on the back. He stiffened slightly, as at an undue familiarity. Either not noticing that or ignoring it, Stone went on, “Good to have you in the flight, by God. First the Bible, now this-you give us a touch of class we sure don’t get from our flight leader here.” He jerked a thumb at Jonathan Moss.

Lieutenant Sprague turned toward Moss, and turned pink at the same time. “Sir, I don’t want to offend or-”

“Don’t worry about it, Charley,” Moss said easily. “I was good enough to bring Percy’s carcass back home when he got himself a puncture a couple of years ago, and now I’m good enough for him to insult. That’s the way the world goes, I guess.”

He made sure Stone understood he was kidding. Both Sprague and Bradley looked worried; they weren’t sure he meant it for a joke till Stone laughed and said, “Well, it’s not like I asked you to do it. I was too busy bleeding for that.”

“I know.” Thinking about what the observer’s cockpit had looked like after he and the groundcrew got Stone out of it made Moss’ stomach do a slow loop. He fought the memory with another gibe: “You gave me so much trouble, I figured you’d make yourself a nuisance to the limeys and the Canucks, too.”

“Indeed.” Charley Sprague trotted out another tag from Shakespeare: “ ‘But when the blast of war blows in our ears, / Then imitate the action of the tiger.’ ”

“I can’t do that, Charley,” Stone said. “I’m not limber enough to lick my own balls.”

All four men from the flight laughed like loons, more because they were young and alive when they could easily have died than because Percy Stone had said anything so very funny. “Come on,” Jonathan Moss said. “Let’s go tell Major Cherney what we did on our summer holiday.”

The squadron commander listened to their report, then said, “I’m glad you’re all back in one piece, but don’t go sticking your heads in the lion’s mouth like that again, and that’s an order.”

“But, sir-” Moss began.

Cherney held up a hand. “No buts, Captain. Even if that ship had no antiaircraft guns at all, you couldn’t sink her or hurt her big guns. Don’t waste yourself on targets like that, not with the war so close to won. Do what you can do. Fight the enemy’s aeroplanes and balloons. Shoot up his men on the ground. If you take on a Great Lakes battleship, you’re fighting out of your weight.”

“But-” Moss said again. Then he remembered Charley Sprague’s words: some of them were better fliers than I was, but they thought they were better than they were, too. And they’d ended up dead, and they hadn’t helped the war effort a bit. Slowly, reluctantly, Moss nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“I’ve been thinking,” George Enos said between gulps of air as he stood beside the one-pounder at the stern of the USS Ericsson after yet another dash to battle stations, this one a drill.

Beside him, Carl Sturtevant was panting more than a little. “Probably won’t do you any lasting harm,” he said, and then, presently, “Yeah? What were you thinking about?”

“That son of a bitch who sank the Cushing yesterday and almost put a fish into us,” Enos answered.

“Yeah, well, I can see how that’d be on your mind,” the veteran petty officer allowed. “So what about it?”

“Whoever the skipper of that boat is, he fights mean,” George answered, to which Sturtevant could only nod. George went on, “He comes at us, and he comes hard, and he doesn’t like to dive deep for hell.”

“That’s all true,” Sturtevant agreed. “Like I said, though, so what?”

“He fights like the skipper who almost sank us before we sank the Bonefish,” Enos persisted. “Whoever he is, whether he’s a limey or a Reb, I don’t think we got him when we got that boat.”

Sturtevant screwed up his face as he thought that over. “That other bastard dove deep and tried to hide after he took a shot at us, didn’t he?” He smacked his lips a couple of times, tasting an idea instead of soup. “Maybe you’ve got something there.” He glanced over toward Lieutenant Crowder, who was talking with another officer. Lowering his voice, Sturtevant said, “You ain’t gonna make him your bosom buddy if you tell him, though.”

“But if I don’t tell him, and we go on doing what we’ve been doing, and he goes on doing what he’s been doing, we’re all liable to end up dead,” Enos said.

Sturtevant didn’t answer. His expression made plain what he was thinking: that Lieutenant Crowder wouldn’t listen even if he did get told. Crowder was convinced he’d sunk the submersible that had come so close to putting the Ericsson on the bottom for good. Telling him otherwise would make him unhappy, which was liable to make George’s life miserable.

Not telling him, though, was liable to make George’s life short. He went over and positioned himself so Lieutenant Crowder would have to notice him sooner or later. It was later, not sooner, but George had been sure it would be. Eventually, the lieutenant said, “You wanted something, Enos?”

George saluted. “Yes, sir,” he said, and proceeded to set out for Crowder the same chain of reasoning as he’d given Carl Sturtevant. As he spoke, he watched Crowder’s face. It was not encouraging. He sighed silently. He hadn’t expected it to be.

When he was through, the officer shook his head. “I don’t believe it for a minute, sailor. That the Rebs or the limeys have put a new boat into this area-that is possible. In fact, it’s more than possible. It’s certain, as recent events have shown. That it would be the boat we battled before-no. We sent that one to the bottom, and that’s where he richly deserves to be.”

“But, sir, the way this fellow operates-” Having begun the effort, George thought he ought to see it through.

Crowder did not give him the chance. “Return to your battle station at once, Enos, or I’ll put you on report.”

“Yes, sir.” Stiff and precise as a steam-powered piece of machinery, George did an about-face and strode back to the one-pounder. Once there, he could look over at Lieutenant Crowder, who’d gone back to talking to the other officer. Enos let out another silent sigh. He really should have known better.

Carl Sturtevant caught his eye. Told you so, the petty officer mouthed. George shaped the beginning of an obscene gesture with a hand his body shielded from Lieutenant Crowder. Sturtevant laughed at him. In spite of that laughter, or maybe because of it, Sturtevant was a pretty good fellow. A lot of petty officers were as stuffy as real officers about ordinary seamen giving them a hard time.

After a couple of minutes to let Crowder get involved in his conversation again, Sturtevant said, “Hell, it probably won’t matter for beans, anyway. Rebs are on their last legs-they’re doing their damnedest to get out of the fight. Pretty soon, it’ll just be us and the limeys, and they won’t last long, either.”

“For all we know, it’s a limey boat we’re talking about. One we sank belonged to the Confederates, yeah, but that’s not the one with the nasty skipper no matter what Lieutenant Crowder thinks.”

“Mm, that’s true,” Sturtevant admitted, “but you’ve got to figure the odds are whoever was patrolling this stretch probably kept right on doing it. It’d be harder to work if things went back and forth between two different countries.”

George thought about that. “All right, you’ve got something there,” he said at last. “Does make sense. If we sank one Rebel boat, that means there’s probably another one prowling around-which means it’s even more likely this is the same skipper who almost got us before.”

“That sounds logical,” Sturtevant said. He nodded over toward Lieutenant Crowder. “You feel like taking another shot at convincing him?”

“No thanks,” Enos answered. “He already knows everything there is to know-and if you don’t believe me, just ask him.”

Without apparently moving a muscle, Sturtevant made his face into a mask of contempt. “I don’t need to ask him. I already know what he knows.” By the tiniest twitch of an eyebrow, he got across how little he thought that was.

“Well, then, shouldn’t we-?” George began.

“I don’t reckon we’ve got to worry about it, on account of it ain’t gonna matter worth a hill of beans anyway.” Sturtevant waved out across the Atlantic. “Look. The Rebs won’t bother keeping a boat around these parts that much longer anyway, because the shipping route they were guarding went to hell and gone when Dom Pedro finally figured out which side his bread was buttered on.”

As if to underscore his words, a flotilla of U.S. cruisers steamed past, heading south. They looked enormous alongside the destroyers that cruised to either side of them, protecting them from submarines as sheepdogs protected their flocks from wolves. Battleships were yet another size up; to George, who was used to going to sea aboard fishing boats, they resembled nothing so much as floating cities.

He said, “Haven’t seen so many of our freighters passing through these parts lately, especially northbound.”

“Probably won’t, either,” Sturtevant answered. “They’ll come down from the USA to supply our warships, yeah, but for a lot of things they won’t have to head back to the States any more. They can load up in one of the Brazilian ports-hell of a lot quicker trip that way.”

“Son of a bitch, you’re right.” Enos shook his head, disgusted with himself. “I should have thought of that.”

“Hey, nobody can think of everything.” Sturtevant glanced over at Lieutenant Crowder again. Crowder, still chattering away with the other officer, tapped his forefinger against his own chest, so he was talking about his favorite subject: himself. The veteran petty officer rolled his eyes. “Jesus Christ, some people can’t think of anything.”

Enos snorted. “I’m not going to argue with you about that.” He made himself cheer up, almost as if a superior officer had given him an order. “And odds are you’re right about the other, too. Once the fellows with the high foreheads back in Philadelphia figure it out, too, they’ll probably call us back to port.”

Carl Sturtevant laughed in his face. “You fisherman, you! It’d be cheaper to do things that way-sure it would. But do you think the Navy gives a fart in a hurricane about cheap? In a pig’s ass they do, especially during a war. We don’t go home till the whole Quadruple Entente’s waving white flags at us-and maybe we don’t go home then, either. Maybe we go around the Horn and teach the Japs they picked the wrong side.” He eyed Enos. “You ever been on the other side of the Equator before?”

“You know damn well I haven’t,” Enos said. “This is further south than I ever figured I’d come before the war started.”

“Just a damn polliwog.” Sturtevant shook his head and clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Well, old Father Neptune will settle your hash.”

Enos had heard about those rituals from sailing men who’d gone through them, some in the Navy, some as merchant seamen. They’d shave his head or put him in a dress or maybe both at once, and he and the rest of the polliwogs on the Ericsson would have to do whatever Father Neptune told them. Something in the way Sturtevant’s eyes gleamed made George ask, “Have you ever been Father Neptune?”

“Who, me? What could have given you that idea?” The petty officer might have been the soul of innocence. Then again, he might not have.

The all-clear sounded then. Lieutenant Crowder kept right on talking with the other officer. As Enos drifted away from his battle station, he quietly asked, “Is he a polliwog, by any chance?”

“I don’t know,” Sturtevant said. “I really don’t know. I may have to go and ask a few questions, because that would be worth finding out. An officer polliwog is just another damn polliwog, as far as Father Neptune’s concerned.” He slapped George on the back. “That could be a lot of fun, couldn’t it?”

“Couldn’t it, though?” George said dreamily. “It’s not that he’s dumb-more that he thinks he’s so smart.”

Chipping paint was easier to take after that, somehow; instead of thinking about himself going through the antics Father Neptune would require of him, he thought about Lieutenant Crowder going through them. When someone else was the victim, the joke got a lot funnier.

The petty officer supervising the never-ending job of stopping rust stared at Enos when he strolled by. “Damn me to hell if you haven’t pulled your weight today,” he said. “Well done.”

When George looked back to see what had impressed the petty officer, he discovered he’d chipped twice as much paint as he usually would have done in so much time. Thinking about Lieutenant Crowder making an ass of himself in front of the whole crew had been so entrancing, he hadn’t kept his work pace to the usual just enough to get by. He shook his head. Now they’d expect him to work this hard all the time-and it was Lieutenant Crowder’s fault.

Everything was Lieutenant Crowder’s fault. “If I get killed, I’ll never forgive him,” George muttered.

Lieutenant Straubing paced among the big White trucks as colored roustabouts hauled supplies from the Covington wharves and loaded them into the green-gray machines for the drive south. Straubing spoke to the men, some white, some black, who would be in the cabs of those trucks: “What you’ve got to remember, boys, is that the war’s not over. Yes, there’s a cease-fire in Tennessee, and it’s still holding pretty well. But the shooting could start up again any day, and there’s still fighting in Virginia and out in the West. Besides, God only knows there are Rebel diehards loose in Kentucky. Don’t do anything stupid like dropping your guard this late in the war. It’d be a shame to get yourself killed now.”

Cincinnatus-Cincinnatus Driver, as he was learning to think of himself these days-turned to the driver nearest him and said, “The lieutenant don’t give two whoops in hell if we get ourselves killed. If the cargo don’t get through to where it’s supposed to go, that’s a different story. That ticks him off plenty.”

Herk chuckled. “You got that one right.” He was as white as Lieutenant Straubing, and Cincinnatus, despite spending a lot of time on the road with him, even getting shot up by some of those diehards with him, still had no idea what his last name was, or even if he owned one. He’d always just been Herk. Now he went on, “The lieutenant treats the cargo like he was paying for it out of his own pocket.”

“Yeah,” Cincinnatus said. He watched the roustabouts load more trucks. He’d done that work himself, before he’d convinced the U.S. forces to let him drive instead-and to pay him more money for doing it. Despite his own experience at their job, he muttered, “I wish they’d move faster, damn it.”

Herk didn’t make any cracks about lazy niggers. Lieutenant Straubing would have given him seventeen different kinds of hell if he had. Men of one color giving men of another a hard time about it interfered with getting materiel down to the front, so he refused to tolerate it. What Herk did say was, “You’ve been itchy to get on the road lately, haven’t you? Kid givin’ you a hard time at home?”

“Nah, it ain’t that so much,” Cincinnatus answered. “When I’m movin’, though, nobody’s botherin’ me, you know what I’m sayin’? There’s just me and the truck and the road, that’s all.”

“Yeah, sure-unless somebody’s layin’ in the bushes with a goddamn machine gun like happened before,” Herk said.

“Happen inside Covington easy as it can outside,” Cincinnatus said. “Had a man shot dead on my own front stoop, remember. Could have been me shot dead out there, easy as that other fella.”

When he was on the road, he didn’t have to worry about whether every stranger he passed on the sidewalk would carry tales about him to Luther Bliss…or to Apicius-no, Apicius Wood-and his Red friends…or to Joe Conroy and however many other Confederate diehards still operated in Covington. When he was on the road, he was free. Oh, he had to obey Lieutenant Straubing’s orders, but his spirit was free. That counted for more than he’d ever imagined.

At last, the cargo bay in his truck was full. Whistling under his breath, he cranked the White’s engine to loud, flatulent life. When it was going, he jumped into the cab and fed it more gas. Other trucks rumbled awake, too. With Lieutenant Straubing in the lead, they headed south.

More of the road down to Tennessee was paved every time Cincinnatus drove it. He suspected that wasn’t true only of the road that went through Covington. The United States would need to move supplies down every highway they could. When the war ended, Kentucky would have a pretty fine network of paved roads, or at least the north-south strands of such a network.

A man in the trucking business-a man like Cincinnatus Driver, say-might do well for himself. There were some rich Negroes in the USA: not many, but a few. That put the USA a few up on the CSA. “A chance,” Cincinnatus muttered. No one sitting beside him in the cab could have heard the words, but that didn’t matter. He knew what he was saying. “All I want is a chance. I ever get it, I’ll make the most of it.”

He wasn’t going to hold his breath hoping he would get it. Laws against blacks weren’t so tough as they were in the CSA, though that varied from state to state. What didn’t vary was that most whites in the USA would have been just as well pleased if they could have readmitted Kentucky without its Negroes.

He rolled past a truck by the side of the road, the driver, a black man, out there with a jack and a pump and a patch, repairing the puncture. Cincinnatus hoped it was only one of those things that happened now and again, and that the diehards hadn’t gone and strewn the road with nails or broken glass or specially made four-pronged inner-tube biters. That would make a lot of trucks late, and that would make Lieutenant Straubing unhappy. Very little else would, but that was guaranteed to do the trick.

Parts of the country were very much as they had been before the war began: prosperous farmlands raising wheat and corn and tobacco and horses. More, though, looked as if a mad devil had lost his temper and spent twenty years kicking it to pieces. That wasn’t even so far wrong, except that war had done the job faster than any devil could have managed.

Near Covington, almost three years had passed since U.S. forces overran the countryside. Grass had grown over trenches; rain had softened their outlines; some of the rubble and wrecked buildings had been cleared away; some had even been rebuilt. The farther south Cincinnatus went, the fresher the scars of war got. The Confederate States had fought as hard as they could to keep Kentucky one of their number-the tormented landscape told of their effort. But it spoke even more loudly of their failure.

Cincinnatus’ luck held: he got through the day without a puncture. After a stop for fuel for the truck and a bowl of pork and beans from an Army kettle at midday, he rolled on steadily until, toward evening, he crossed from Kentucky into Tennessee. He started passing bands of soldiers heading toward the front. They got off onto the soft shoulder for the truck convoy and smiled and waved as the big, square, clumsy machines passed them. They even smiled and waved at Cincinnatus. They had the world by the tail, and they knew it.

He also steered the truck past columns of men coming away from the front. A few of them, a very few, showed the same high spirits as the soldiers who were replacing them. Most simply trudged along toward the north, putting one foot in front of the other, their faces and no doubt their minds far away. They’d seen so much hell, they didn’t yet realize they’d escaped it-or perhaps they’d brought it with them.

They’d converted the White from acetylene lamps to electric ones not too long before; Cincinnatus enjoyed being able to throw light on the dimming road ahead at the turn of a knob, without having to stop and get out. He’d liked it even better the first time he’d done it in the rain.

At last, about nine o’clock, they pulled into the supply depot. “We expected you an hour ago,” complained an officer with a quartermaster’s badge: crossed sword and key over a wheel on which perched an eagle. Cincinnatus had never known a quartermaster with a good word to say to or about the men who fetched him the supplies he then grudgingly disbursed.

“Sorry, sir,” Lieutenant Straubing said. “We made the best time we could.” He had to give a soft answer: the other man outranked him.

“Likely story,” the quartermaster sniffed. “Well, you’re here now, so we’ll unload you.” He made it sound as if he were doing the truck convoy an enormous favor.

“That’s good, sir,” Straubing said equably. “I can certainly see you’ve been ready for us this past hour.”

In the cab of his truck, Cincinnatus chuckled. Nobody was waiting to unload the trucks. Plenty of people should have been. Straubing knew just how to place the dart to get the most damage with it. “Lieutenant…” the other officer began, doing his best to make Straubing wish he’d never been born. But the truth was too obvious for him to bluster his way past it. He seemed to deflate like a punctured observation balloon that hadn’t caught fire. Then he started shouting for soldiers to get off their lazy backsides and come unload the trucks.

Lieutenant Straubing, having got what he wanted, turned into the soul of helpfulness, offering all sorts of suggestions so the soldiers could do the job quicker and more efficiently. He seemed to be everywhere at once. When he passed Cincinnatus’ truck, he tipped him a wink. Cincinnatus grinned and winked back.

Straubing used the quartermaster’s embarrassment to get him to order his men to run up tents in which the drivers from the truck convoy could spend the night. More and more trucks kept rattling into the depot, as those that had had punctures or breakdowns on the road down from Covington caught up with the rest.

Straubing also arranged for bedrolls and hot meals for the men in his charge. Spooning up greasy stew full of meat that might have come from an elderly cow or a fairly tender mule, Herk said, “The lieutenant, he looks out for his people, no two ways about it.”

“He does that,” Cincinnatus agreed, talking with his mouth full. He’d seen as much before, when Lieutenant Straubing placed under arrest soldier-drivers who tried to refuse to work alongside Negroes from Covington. He didn’t mention that to Herk, because he wasn’t sure the white driver would take it as supporting his point of view. “I ain’t worked for many bosses as good as he is like that. Don’t know if I ever worked for any, now as I think about it.”

Tom Kennedy had come pretty close. Like Lieutenant Straubing, though not to the same degree, he’d been more interested in the work he could get out of Cincinnatus than in what color he was. For a white citizen of the Confederate States, he’d been as good a boss as a colored resident-not citizen-of the CSA could hope for. If he hadn’t been, Cincinnatus would have turned him over to the Yankee soldiers, that night they came looking for him.

His life probably would have been simpler if he had. Too late to worry about that, though. Too late to worry about Tom Kennedy, too, except to wonder who had put a bullet through his head. Shaking his own head, Cincinnatus went back to get more stew and a tin cup full of coffee.

“Come on, boys-eat up and get some sleep,” Straubing called, like a father telling a houseful of children what to do. “We’re heading back to Covington before it gets light; they’ll need us again soon as we can be there. I told you before, the war’s not done till the Rebs roll over and play dead along the whole line.”

The men in the convoy obeyed as children would obey their father, too. Cincinnatus gulped down his coffee-he was tired enough, he knew it wouldn’t keep him awake long-and ducked into one of the tents. He took off his shoes, wrapped himself in a blanket as much to hold bugs at bay as for warmth, and drifted toward sleep.

Outside the tent, the officer from the depot spoke: “Lieutenant, I will say you have yourself a pretty fair batch of men there.”

“I’ve spent a lot of time getting them to where I want them, sir,” Lieutenant Straubing answered. “I must say, I’m not altogether displeased with them now myself. By whatever means necessary, they get the job done. They took a while to learn that from me, but now they’ve got it down solid. They get the job done, and that’s what counts.”