Drive to the East

XII

All ahead one-third,” Sam Carsten called down to the engine room from the Josephus Daniels’ bridge.

“All ahead one-third, sir, aye aye.” The answer came back at once. The destroyer escort picked up a little speed.

Sam read the chart by the dim glow of a flashlight with red cellophane taped over the bulb. That didn’t spoil his night vision and wouldn’t be visible from any great distance. Getting out of Philadelphia Harbor and Delaware Bay was going to be even more fun than escaping Chesapeake Bay.

If the clouds overhead broke… If they did, moonlight would pour down on the U.S. warship while she was still sneaking through the minefields that protected the harbor. That, to put it mildly, wouldn’t be good. Confederate subs lurked just outside, hungry for anything they could catch.

“I wish they would have given us a pilot who really knows these minefields,” Pat Cooley said.

“Me, too,” Sam told his exec. “I asked for one at the Navy yard. Hell, I screamed for one. They wouldn’t give him to me. They said we’d have to stop and lower a boat to let him come back, and that that would make the mission even more dangerous. They said they didn’t have enough pilots like that for us to just go on and take him with us.”

“Well, I can sort of see their point,” Cooley said reluctantly. “Sort of.” In the light of that cellophane-covered flashlight, he looked like a pink, angry ghost. “If we were a battleship or a carrier, though, we would have got one.”

“Now that you mention it, yes.” Carsten gave the younger officer a crooked smile. “Didn’t you figure out we were expendable the first time they gave us a shore-bombardment mission?”

“Sorry, sir. I guess I’m just naive,” Cooley answered. “But I’ll tell you something-I’m sure as hell convinced now.”

“That’s, uh, swell.” Sam had almost said it was bully. To someone the executive officer’s age, that would have smacked of the nineteenth century, if not the Middle Ages. Since Sam was only middle-aged himself-and not always reconciled to that-he didn’t want Cooley to think of him as one with Nineveh and Tyre. Then he stopped flabbling about changing tastes in American slang and went back to worrying about getting blown out of the water if he screwed up. “Come left to 150. I say again, come left to 150.”

“Coming left to one-five-oh: aye aye, sir.” Cooley changed course without question or comment. He was still the best shiphandler on the Josephus Daniels. In a nasty spot like this, the best shiphandler belonged at the wheel. He had to make his course corrections on the basis of what Sam told him, and had to hope Sam was telling him the right thing. If that wasn’t enough to give you an ulcer before you hit thirty, Sam didn’t know what would be.

Even if I do everything right, we still may go sky-high, Sam thought unhappily. Not all Confederate submersibles carried torpedoes. Some laid mines. If they’d laid some that U.S. sweepers hadn’t found yet, that could get-interesting. Or a moored mine might have come loose. If it drifted into their path… Sam would have done everything right, and a fat lot of good it would do him.

He gauged distances and times and speed and ordered other course corrections. Lieutenant Cooley coolly made them. “How am I doing?” the exec asked after a while.

“You’re here to ask the question. You’re standing on a nice, level deck. We’re not burning. We’re not sinking. You’re doing fine. If you hit a mine, I’ll have something to say to you. Till then, don’t worry about it.”

Cooley chuckled. “You’ve got a good way of looking at things, sir.”

“Do I? I don’t know,” Sam said. “This whole business of being in command is new to me. I’m making it up as I go along-and I probably shouldn’t tell you a word of that. Well, too goddamn bad. It’s not like you and everybody else aboard don’t already know it.”

“Don’t worry about it, sir. Everybody knows you’re the Old Man, and everybody feels good about it,” Cooley said.

“Thanks,” Sam said. On the Josephus Daniels, he was the old man literally as well as figuratively. The destroyer escort had a couple of grizzled chiefs with close to his mileage on them, but only a couple. He was old enough to be father for most of the crew. If anything, that might help his position of command. If somebody looked and sounded like your dad, you were used to taking orders from him. Of course, if you were eighteen you were probably convinced your dad was a jerk, so maybe command authority didn’t follow from age after all.

Like his early small worry, that one got submerged in the intricacy and tension of what he was doing. He stayed at it till the gray light of earliest morning grew brighter than the flashlight’s red beam. Then he stood up very straight and allowed himself to look away from the chart and stretch.

“I think we’re through it, Pat,” he said.

“Good. That’s hard work.” The exec also stretched. “I think we handled it about as well as we could.”

“You did the hard part,” Carsten said. “I just told you where to go.” He grinned. “I’m the only man on this ship who can.”

“You’re the only one who can say it,” Cooley replied. “Everybody else just thinks it.” He turned to the bespectacled, extremely junior J.G. in charge of the Y-range gear. “Isn’t that right, Walters?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir,” Thad Walters replied, deadpan-which, in a perverse way, proved Cooley’s point.

Sam took another look at the lightening sky. He didn’t like what he saw, not even a little bit. “Any sign of those damn Confederate maritime bombers?” he asked, knowing he sounded anxious. Any skipper without air cover of his own-and even skippers with it-had the right to sound anxious in this day and age.

Walters eyed the screen. So did Sam. He didn’t see anything untoward, but would an expert? War was getting to be a business of gadget against gadget, not man against man. Well, that had been true when battleships ruled the seas, too, but the gadgets were a lot subtler these days.

“Looks all right for now,” the young J.G. said.

“Keep an eye peeled,” Sam told him. He spoke into a voice tube: “Anything on the hydrophone, Bevacqua?”

“No, sir,” the petty officer’s voice came back. “Everything’s quiet.”

“That’s what I like to hear.” Another gadget, Sam thought. They’d had hydrophones during the Great War, too. Back then, though, you’d had to stop to listen. If a sub was in the neighborhood, stopping wasn’t the best thing you could do. In the last war, also, the hydrophone could give you a bearing on where a submersible prowled, but not a range.

The boys with the thick glasses and the slide rules had fancied up the device in the interwar years. These days, hydrophones could filter out a ship’s own engine noise, though they still worked better in silence. They could also say just where in the water an enemy submarine hid. The way Vince Bevacqua explained it, new-model hydrophones used sound waves as Y-ranging gear used wireless waves: they bounced them off a target and picked up the reflections.

Technical details fascinated Sam. He knew he would never be able to repair, let alone improve, a Y-range set or a hydrophone. That didn’t bother him. The better he understood how the gadgets worked, what they could and couldn’t do, the better he’d be able to use them and the more he could count on what they told him.

“Keep listening,” was all he said now.

“Who, me?” Bevacqua answered. Sam laughed. He knew how hard the petty officer concentrated with the earphones on his head.

Pat Cooley waved at the thick clouds overhead. “We’ve got a nice low ceiling this morning,” he remarked. “We probably don’t have to worry about the maritime bombers too much. Only thing that has any real chance of running across us is a flying boat out snooping.”

“Yeah, those bastards fly low all the time,” Sam agreed. “One of these days before too long, they’ll have Y-range gear, too, and then everything’ll be out to lunch. Makes you wonder what the Navy’s coming to, doesn’t it?” He wasn’t worried, not as far as his own career went. A kid like Cooley would see a lot more change, though.

The exec didn’t seem unduly worried. “If we’re vulnerable to air power, we’ll just have to bring our own air power with us, that’s all. If our airplanes shoot down their airplanes before they can get at us, we win. That was the real lesson of the Pacific War.”

Sam had been in the Pacific War. Cooley hadn’t even been at Annapolis yet. That didn’t mean he was wrong. “Carriers have a hard time operating against land-based air, though,” he said. “Too many attackers can swamp you. We found that out at Charleston.” He’d been there, too, when this war was new.

“Put enough carriers together and you’ll swamp the land-based air.” Cooley might have been right about that. Neither the United States nor Britain, the two major carrier powers in the Atlantic, had been able to prove it yet. Japan was trying its hardest to do so over and around the Sandwich Islands.

Since Sam couldn’t prove anything one way or the other, he said, “Bring us around to course 090, Pat.”

“Changing course to 090-aye aye, sir.” Cooley swung the Josephus Daniels to port till she was steady on her new easterly course. “Steady on 090, sir.”

“Thank you. Now we’ve got a clear track to Providence-except for subs and mines and raiders and those flying boats and other little details like that.”

“Providence?” By the way the exec said it, he might have been talking about the Black Hole of Calcutta. He sighed noisily. “Well, it’s better than staying stuck in Philadelphia would be… I suppose. What are we going to do there, deliver the Daniels so she can take over as a training ship for the swabbies there?”

Seamen learning their trade went out on the Lamson, a destroyer of Great War vintage. They learned to fire weapons aboard her. They formed the black gang that served her wheezy engines. They worked in the galleys. They cleaned heads. They learned what it was like to sleep in a hammock with another sailor’s bad breath and backside only inches from their face.

“We’re not quite spavined enough for that,” Sam said. Cooley raised an eyebrow at an evidently unfamiliar word, but he figured out what it had to mean. Sam felt his years showing again. Back when people talked about horses all the time, you heard spavined every week if not every day. But the exec had grown up in an automotive age. If you talked about a spavined motorcar, you were making a joke, not describing anything real. Sam went on, “We’re going to escort a convoy down the coast to New York City and then back to Philly.”

“Should be exciting.” The exec mimed an enormous yawn.

Sam laughed. “If you’re on convoy-escort duty, you hope to Jesus it isn’t exciting. Everything that could make it exciting is bad.”

“I suppose so.” Cooley grudged him a nod, then winked. “One thing, Skipper-all that zigzagging will do wonders for you at the wheel.”

“Yeah, I know,” Sam answered seriously, which spoiled Cooley’s joke, but the same thought had already occurred to him. And he wanted his shiphandling to get better. He wanted everything he did to get better. He’d got such a late start at being an officer, and still had so much catching up to do…

Fremont Blaine Dalby stared at the ships coming into Pearl Harbor. The CPO shook his head. “If those aren’t two of the ugliest sons of bitches I ever set eyes on, then you two guys are.” He nodded to Fritz Gustafson and George Enos, Jr.

George said, “I dunno, Chief. They look pretty damn good to me.”

“Yeah.” Gustafson added a nod.

“Bullshit,” Dalby said. The boss of the twin-40mm crew was a man of strong opinions. His being a Republican proved that. Some of his opinions were crackpot, too; as far as George was concerned, his being a Republican also proved that. He went on, “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we don’t need ’em, on account of we do. But they’re still as ugly as the guy sitting next to you on the head.”

George grunted at that. Like any new sailor, he’d had to get used to doing his business in a facility without stalls. He hadn’t thought about it for a while now, and wondered if he’d be stricken with constipation because he did. He admitted to himself-if not to Fremont Dalby-that the senior rating had a point of sorts. The Trenton and the Chapultepec didn’t have the raked grace of a heavy cruiser. But the escort carriers brought something vital to the Sandwich Islands: hope.

They looked like what they were-freighters that had had their superstructures torn off and replaced with a flight deck. A tiny starboard island didn’t begin to make up for what had been amputated. But they carried thirty airplanes apiece. They had dive bombers and torpedo-carriers, and fighters to protect the strike aircraft and the ships themselves. The two of them put together were worth about as much as one fleet carrier.

“What I want to know is, are there more of them out in the Pacific?” George said. “That’s what really counts. If they can watch the gap where airplanes from the Sandwich Islands can’t stay and the ones from the West Coast can’t, either, then we really might hang on to this place.”

“They didn’t come by themselves, you know,” Dalby reminded him. “Most of the freighters and tankers that came with ’em are unloading in Honolulu, not here. But everybody’ll have enough beans and gasoline for a while longer.”

“Sure, Chief.” Disagreeing with a CPO when you were only an able seaman took diplomacy. Picking his words with care, George went on, “But it’s not waddayacallit-not economical, that’s what I want to say-to send these ugly ducklings back and forth to Frisco or wherever for each new convoy.”

“He’s right,” Gustafson said-another good-sized speech for him. He was a petty officer himself, though not an exalted chief. He could speak somewhat more freely to Dalby, but only somewhat. George was more than halfway convinced that CPOs really ran the Navy. They let officers think they did, but so many officers’ orders were based on what they heard from CPOs. A lieutenant, J.G., who tried to buck one of the senior ratings didn’t have a prayer. Even his own superiors wouldn’t back him, and it wouldn’t have helped if they did.

“Well, yeah,” Fremont Dalby said, “but these babies ought to be good for more than defense. They ought to be able to play sixty minutes. How many of ’em d’you figure we’d need to take Midway back from the Buddhaheads?”

Gustafson eyed the Chapultepec, which was closer. “Damn thing can’t do more’n eighteen knots if you chuck her off a cliff,” he opined-a veritable oration. He didn’t bother to say what he already knew: that Japanese fleet carriers, like most self-respecting warships, could make better than thirty.

Dalby only shrugged. “Doesn’t matter all that much. Airplanes are a hell of a lot faster than ships any which way.”

That held some truth, but only some. Other things went into the mix. “Jap carriers can walk away from subs. These little guys won’t be able to.”

Another shrug from the gun chief. “That’s why the Townsend’s in the Navy. If we can’t keep submersibles off of carriers, what the hell good are we?”

George gave up. He wasn’t about to change Dalby’s mind. That was as plain as the nose on the CPO’s face-which was saying something, because Dalby had a formidable honker. In the end, changing Dalby’s mind didn’t matter a dime’s worth anyhow. Dalby wasn’t the one who’d decide what to do with the escort carriers. He wasn’t the one who’d decide what to do with the Townsend, either, though he often acted as if he were the skipper.

He said, “It’ll be goddamn nice operating with real air cover for a change. Not even the brass’d be dumb enough to send us out naked anymore.”

“Here’s hoping.” Fritz Gustafson packed a world of skepticism into two words.

This time, George thought Dalby had the right of it. There were plenty of land-based airplanes on Oahu. Why send carriers all the way to the Sandwich Islands if not to use them with the rest of the Navy?

When the Townsend put to sea a few days later, she did so without either the Trenton or the Chapultepec. Even though she did, George didn’t flabble about it: she went out on an antisubmersible patrol to the east of Oahu. Japanese carrier-based aircraft were most unlikely to find her there.

After George remarked on that, Dalby looked at him-looked through him, really. “You’d sooner be torpedoed?”

“Got a better chance against a sub than we would against airplanes,” George said stubbornly. Then he wondered if that was true. His father hadn’t had any chance against a submarine. But he got sucker-punched after the war was over. We’d be on our toes.

Whenever George was on deck, he kept an eye peeled for periscopes. He also looked for the thin, pale exhaust from a submersible’s diesel engine. What with the Townsend’s hydrophone gear, all that was probably wasted effort. He didn’t care, not even a little bit. He did it anyhow. He noticed he was far from the only one who did.

He wasn’t on deck when general quarters sounded. He was rinsing off in the shower. He threw on his skivvies and ran for his gun with the rest of his clothes, including his shoes, under his arm.

Nobody laughed, or not very much. Nobody who’d been in the Navy longer than a few weeks hadn’t been caught the same way. He dressed at his post. His hair was still wet. It dripped in his face and down his back. He would have minded that much more in the North Atlantic in December than he did here.

“Now hear this!” The exec’s voice crackled out of the loudspeakers. “We’ve found us a submarine, and we are going to prosecute the son of a bitch.”

An excited buzz ran through the sailors. George looked enviously up toward the depth-charge launchers near the destroyer’s bow. Their crews were the ones who’d have the fun of dropping things on the Japs’ heads.

“Don’t go to sleep, now,” Fremont Dalby warned. “If those bastards surface, we’re the ones who’ll fill ’em full of holes.” He set a hand on one of the 40mm’s twin barrels. The quick-firing gun made an admirable can opener.

The Townsend swung to port. Down under the surface, a submersible was no doubt maneuvering, too. It could have been cat-and-mouse, but the mouse here had almost as good a chance as the cat. The Townsend’s advantage was speed, the sub’s stealth. Where was that boat?

They must have thought they knew, for depth charges flew from the launchers and splashed into the Pacific. George waited, bracing himself. When the ashcans burst, it was like a kick in the ass from an elephant. The Townsend’s bow lifted, then slammed back down.

More charges arced through the air. Some would be set for a depth a little less than the hydrophone operator thought accurate, some for a little more. With luck, the submersible wouldn’t get away. With luck…

“Oil! Oil!” somebody yelled. His voice cracked the second time he said it.

“Could be a trick,” Fritz Gustafson said. George nodded. A canny sub skipper would deliberately release oil and air bubbles to try to fool his tormentors into thinking they’d smashed him. Then he could slink away or strike back as he got the chance.

Not this time, though. “Coming up!” screamed somebody near the bow. “Motherfucker’s coming up!”

Like a breaching whale but far bigger, the Japanese submarine surfaced. She might not have been able to stay down anymore, but she still showed fight. Men tumbled out of her conning tower and ran for the deck guns. The odds against them were long-a destroyer vastly outgunned a submersible-but they had a chance. If they could hurt the Townsend badly enough, they might yet get away.

But the destroyer’s guns were already manned and ready. George wasn’t sure if his weapon was the very first to start blazing away, but it was among the first. Tracers walked across the water toward the sub less than a mile away. They were close enough to the target to let him see chunks of metal fly when shells slammed into the side of the boat and the conning tower. One of the shells hit a Japanese sailor amidships. He exploded into red mist. There were worse ways to go; he must have died before he knew it.

The Japs got off a few shots. One of them hit near the Townsend’s bow, just aft of the ashcan launchers. George heard shrieks through the din of gunfire. But the sub was in over its head. Its guns were out in the open and unprotected, and the American 40mms and machine guns picked off the crews in nothing flat. When the destroyer’s main armament started taking bites out of the sub’s hull, it quickly sank. It kept firing as long as it could. The crew had guts-no way around that.

A few men still bobbed in the water after the submersible went down. The Townsend steered toward them and threw lines and life rings into the water. The Japanese sailors stubbornly refused to take them. A couple of sailors deliberately sank when lines came near. Others shook defiant fists at the ship that had sunk their sub. They shouted what had to be insults in their own language.

“They’re crazy,” George said. “If that was me, I’d be up on this deck and down on my knees thanking God they’d rescued me instead of shooting me or leaving me for shark bait or just to drown.”

“Japs aren’t like that,” Dalby said. “Bunch of crazy monkeys, if you want to know what I think.”

“They figure being a POW is the worst thing in the world,” Fritz Gustafson said. “Far as they’re concerned, dying’s better.”

“Like I said-crazy,” Dalby said.

“Nasty, too.” Gustafson was, for him, in a talky mood. “Don’t let ’em catch you. If you’re a POW, they figure you’re in disgrace. Anything goes, near enough.”

“How do you know that?” George asked.

The loader shrugged. “You hear stuff, is all.”

One of the last Japanese sailors afloat spat seawater up at the Townsend. He made gestures that probably meant the same as giving her the finger. The ship took the perfect revenge: she sailed away. The sailors whooped and cheered. “I think you’re right, Chief,” George said. “They are crazy.”

“Told you so,” Fremont Dalby said smugly. “I just wish they weren’t so goddamn tough, that’s all.”

Jefferson Pinkard inspected his dress grays in the mirror. He looked pretty goddamn sharp, if he did say so himself. The three wreathed silver stars on either side of his collar gleamed and sparkled. The way he’d polished them, they couldn’t very well do anything else. His silver belt buckle shone, too. So did the black leather of his belt and boots.

When he got married the first time, back before the Great War, he’d done it in a rented tailcoat. He’d thought he was hot stuff, then. Maybe he’d even been right. His belly hadn’t bulged over his belt in those days, anyhow.

He scowled as the memory came back. Emily’d been hot stuff in those days, too. Too goddamn hot, it turned out. “Little whore,” he growled. She hadn’t wanted to wait till he got back from the trenches. She’d spread it around, starting with his best friend. He remembered walking in after he got a leave he hadn’t told her about ahead of time, walking in and…

Angrily, he turned away from the mirror. Then, feeling foolish, he had to turn back to get his hat-almost a Stetson, but with a higher crown and a wider brim-cocked at just the right jaunty angle. Everything was going to be perfect, dammit, perfect, and he wasn’t going to think about Emily even once.

A Birmingham painted in official butternut waited for him. “Take you into town, sir?” the driver said.

“If you don’t, we ain’t got a show,” Jeff answered, and the fellow behind the wheel laughed. Jeff added, “Yeah, you might as well. I’ve come this far. I don’t reckon I’ll chicken out now.” He slid into the back seat.

“Better not,” the driver agreed. “That’s where you get one of them waddayacallems-breeches of promise suits, that’s it.”

That wasn’t exactly it, but came close enough. Jeff wondered if any lawyers were filing breach of promise suits these days, or if the Army had grabbed them all. Most, anyhow, he guessed. But a maiden spurned could probably still find a lawyer to be her knight in shining armor-at a suitable hourly rate, of course.

Edith Blades was no maiden. On the other hand, Jeff didn’t aim to spurn her. “Long as I’m at the church, everything’ll be just fine,” he said.

A couple of buses sat in the church parking lot. They’d brought guards in from Camp Determination. Patrols would be thin there this afternoon and evening. Jeff hoped they wouldn’t be too thin. He didn’t think they would. He’d made the camp as hard to break out of as he could. It ought to get along just fine for a few hours with a skeleton crew.

Hip Rodriguez waited in the doorway and waved when Jeff got out of the Birmingham. Edith had squawked a little when Jeff asked a Mexican to be his best man, but he’d won the argument. “Wasn’t for him, sweetheart,” he’d said, “it’s not real likely I’d be here to marry you.” Edith hadn’t found any answer for that. Pinkard hadn’t figured she could.

“You look good, Senor Jeff,” Rodriguez called.

“So do you,” Pinkard said, which was true. His old Army buddy hadn’t put on nearly so much weight as he had, and looked impressive as the devil in his guard’s uniform. Whoever had designed those clothes knew how to intimidate.

“Gracias.” Rodriguez’s smile was on the sheepish side. “You know something? This is the very first time I ever go inside a Protestant church.”

Thinking about it, Jeff realized he’d never set foot inside a Catholic church. He remembered some of the things he’d heard about those places when he was growing up in Birmingham. Turning them on their head, he said, “Don’t worry, Hip. I promise we don’t keep the Devil down in the storm cellar.”

By the way his pal started to cross himself, he must have been wondering something like that. Rodriguez broke off the gesture before completing it. “Of course not, Senor Jeff,” he said, though his expression argued it was anything but of course.

Jeff went on into the vestibule or whatever they called the antechamber just inside the entrance. Edith’s sister, who would be her maid of honor, stood guard at the door to the minister’s little office. The bride waited in there, and the groom was not going to set eyes on her till the ceremony started.

Jeff liked Judy Smallwood just fine. If he hadn’t got to know Edith first, he might have liked her sister better. Since Judy was going back to Alexandria right after the wedding, though, that wasn’t likely to prove a problem. “You look mighty nice,” he told her, and she did. Her dress was of glowing blue taffeta with short puffed sleeves that set off her figure and her fair skin, dark blond hair, and blue eyes.

By the way those eyes traveled him, she thought he cut a pretty fine figure himself in his fancy uniform. She said, “Kind of a shame you haven’t got anybody coming out from Alabama for the day.”

“My ma and pa been dead for years,” Jeff answered with a shrug. “Don’t have any brothers or sisters. My cousins…” He shrugged again. “I don’t recollect the last time I talked to one of them. They heard from me now, they’d just reckon I was aiming to pry a wedding present out of ’em.”

“Well, if it’s like that, you shouldn’t,” Judy said. “It’s too bad, though.”

“Have I got time for a cigarette before we get going?” Jeff wondered. He’d just pulled the pack out of his pocket when the minister emerged from the office. Jeff made the cigarettes disappear again. A smoke would have calmed his nerves, but he could do without. Anyhow, the only real cure for prewedding jitters was about four stiff drinks, and that would make people talk. He touched the brim of his hat. “Howdy, Parson.”

“Mr. Pinkard,” the Reverend Luke Sutton said, bobbing his bald head in return. He sent Hip Rodriguez a slightly fishy stare. Rodriguez showed no sign of sprouting horns on his forehead or letting a barbed tail slither out past his trouser cuffs, so the minister looked away and started down the aisle.

Mrs. Sutton struck up the wedding march on a beat-up old upright piano against one wall. Some Baptist churches didn’t approve of music at all; Jeff was glad the Suttons weren’t quite so strict. As they’d rehearsed, he listened to her play it through once. Then he headed down the aisle himself. His best man followed.

Uniforms filled the folding chairs on one side. The other held Edith’s relatives: ordinary-looking men and women in black suits and in dresses of a variety of colors and styles-some of them must have dated from just after the Great War, and they ran up to the present.

Edith’s sons by Chick Blades were the ring bearers. Small, smothered chuckles rose as people got a look at the young boys. Jeff had to work to keep his own face straight. Edith had told him she would make sure Frank and Willie didn’t have silly grins on their faces when they came down the aisle. She’d put the fear of God in them, all right, better than Reverend Sutton could have dreamt of doing. They looked serious past the point of solemnity-all the way to absurdity, in fact.

Edith’s sister came next. She was grinning, but on her it looked good. And Edith herself followed a moment later. Her dress was identical in cut to Judy’s, but of a taffeta somewhere between cream and beige: this wasn’t her first marriage, so white wouldn’t have been right. She’d had to do some searching to find a veil that matched, but she’d managed.

She stood beside Jeff. They faced the minister. He went through a wedding sermon he’d probably delivered a hundred times before. It wasn’t fresh. It wasn’t exciting. It wasn’t even very interesting. Pinkard didn’t care. It was official-that was all that mattered. Before too long, Sutton got down to business. They exchanged rings, taking them from the velvet pillows Edith’s sons carried. “Do you, Jefferson Davis Pinkard, take this woman as your lawful wedded wife, to have and to hold, to love and to cherish, in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, for better, for worse, till death do you part?”

“I do,” Jeff said.

Edith’s vows were the same, except there was a to obey in them somewhere. Jeff hardly noticed it, and suspected Edith would hardly notice it, either. Her chin went up in pride as she also said, “I do.”

“Then by the authority vested in me by the Confederate Baptist Convention and by the sovereign state of Texas, I now pronounce you man and wife,” Luke Sutton declared. “You may kiss the bride.”

Jeff lifted Edith’s veil to do just that. He made the kiss thorough without, he hoped, making a spectacle of himself. Edith stayed relaxed in his arms, so he didn’t think he overdid it.

The wedding march rang out again as the new couple and their attendants went up the aisle to the back of the church. Everybody else filed by to congratulate them. “Well, what do you think?” Jeff asked Hip Rodriguez after the last guards and cousins of Edith’s slowly shuffled past.

“Very nice, Senor Jeff,” Rodriguez answered, but he couldn’t help adding, “I miss the priest’s fancy robes and the incense and the Latin. This way, it hardly seems like you are in an iglesia-a church.”

“Oh, it’s a church, all right,” Jeff said. He had seen priests in rich robes down in the Empire of Mexico. He hadn’t seen a service there, though. It didn’t seem as if those prelates and somebody like Reverend Sutton were talking about the same God.

The church boasted a little social hall next to the sanctuary. The reception was there. The punch and cider were teetotal; Reverend Sutton wouldn’t have it any other way. Warned of this, Jeff had got the intelligence to the guards. A lot of them carried flasks with which to improve the liquid refreshment. They stayed reasonably discreet, and the minister stayed reasonably polite.

One of the guards made models for a hobby. Working with a tiny brush, he’d changed the clothes of the groom atop the wedding cake from white tie and tails to dress-gray uniform. The figure was still too slim to make a good image of Jeff Pinkard, but it looked a lot more like him than it had before. Edith stuffed gooey chocolate cake into his mouth, and he did the same for her.

He wasn’t sorry not to dance on church property. He’d never been much for cutting a rug. At about ten o’clock, he and Edith went out to the Birmingham. People cheered and yelled bawdy advice and pelted them with rice. The driver took them back to Jeff’s quarters. Edith squeaked when he picked her up to carry her over the threshold. Then, as he set her down, he said, “What’s this?”

This was a bottle of champagne in a bucket of ice by the bed. A card in an envelope leaned against the bucket. When Jeff opened the envelope and took out the card, his eyes almost bugged out of his head. Hope the two of you stay real happy together, it read in a looping scrawl surely written by no secretary. The signature was in that same rough hand: Jake Featherston.

“Oh,” Edith said, reading it with him. “Oh, Jeff.”

“Yeah,” Jeff said. “That’s… somethin’, all right.” He picked up the champagne bottle. “Reckon the least we can do is drink some o’ this before…” He stopped. Edith turned pink anyhow. He laughed. Wedding nights were for laughing, weren’t they?

Champagne went down smoother than spiked punch had. Edith got pinker yet, not from embarrassment but from the sparkling wine. Jeff picked her up again. He was a big man, and she wasn’t a very large woman. This time, he set her down on the bed.

She was no giggling maiden. She knew what was what, the same as Jeff did. That made it better, as far as he was concerned. When it was over, he stroked her, lazy in the afterglow. “Hello there, wife,” he said.

“Hello… husband,” Edith said, and started to cry. “I love you, Jeff.” Even though she said it, even though he was sure she meant it, he knew she was remembering Chick, too. He didn’t know what the hell he could do about it. Doing nothing seemed the smartest thing, so he did that.

Chester Martin’s leg still didn’t feel like carrying him around. Like it or not, though, the leg could do the job. The Army let wounded men heal, but only as long as it absolutely had to. Then it threw them back into the meat grinder to see if they could get chopped up again.

As Martin lit a cigarette in a replacement depot somewhere in western Pennsylvania, he wondered why the devil he’d joined up again. He’d known he could get hurt. Get hurt, hell-he could get killed. He’d done it anyhow. After a while, you forgot how bad it had been. That was the only thing he could think of. Women said the same thing happened when they had babies. If they’d truly remembered how bad labor was, none of them would have had more than one.

He couldn’t imagine a lonelier place than this depot. He was still part of the Army, of course, but he wasn’t exactly in it. He wasn’t part of a unit. A soldier by himself was hardly a soldier at all. Whatever outfit he joined now, he’d be the new guy for a while-till enough other men got killed and maimed and enough other replacements took over for them to make him an old-timer again.

The way things were going these days, it wouldn’t take long.

Men ranging in rank from private up to major sat on benches and folding chairs. Some of them smoked, some read newspapers or paperback adventures or mysteries, some just stared into space. Chester recognized that stare, because he’d worn it: the look of a man who’d seen too much of hell. You could help a buddy out when things got bad, or he could help you. Nobody here had a buddy. That was part of being in limbo, a bad part. You were stuck with yourself.

A fat technical sergeant who would never get any closer to the front than this called out three names, following each with a serial number. Two privates and a corporal shouldered the packs they’d had between their feet. They went up to the tech sergeant, signed some papers, and went out the door by which Chester had come in. They were fully part of the military machinery again.

Off in the distance, antiaircraft guns barked. Confederate dive bombers and strafing fighters were tearing up U.S. positions in these parts, softening them so C.S. barrels and foot soldiers could cut through them more easily. The boys in butternut had the bit between their teeth again, and they were running like hell.

Chester ground out the cigarette under his heel and lit another one. He didn’t have the wind he’d had the last time around, but who did? Smoking gave him something to do. It was as much fun as he was allowed to have here.

Out popped that tech sergeant again. Half a dozen privates got up and trudged off to whatever awaited them. Chester went on chain-smoking. Second lieutenants got killed in droves. First sergeants were a tougher, smarter-or at least more experienced-breed. Till one went down, he’d sit here twiddling his thumbs.

“Martin, Chester A.!” the tech sergeant yelled, and his pay number after it. The man also shouted several other names.

Speak of the devil, Martin thought. He rose, slung on his pack-which didn’t make his sore leg rejoice-and went over to the other noncom. The men with him were all kids-a PFC and five or six newly minted privates. The technical sergeant paid more attention to him than to the rest of them put together. Chester signed off on his paperwork, then went outside.

He’d wondered if his new outfit would have sent another senior sergeant to collect men from the repple-depple. Instead, a shavetail second lieutenant awaited him. That was good news and bad: good because it showed his new CO had enough sense to pick somebody who wasn’t needed in the field, bad because the youngster here was liable to know that and resent it.

By the sour expression on the lieutenant’s rather rabbity features, he knew it too well. “Hello, Sergeant. I’m Jack Husak,” he said. “You’re my new nursemaid, aren’t you?”

Yes, Chester thought as he saluted and gave his own name. But dealing with a superior with a chip on his shoulder was the last thing he wanted, so he said, “I’m sure that won’t be necessary, sir.”

“So am I,” Husak said. “I’ve been in charge of my platoon for a good six weeks now, and I’ve got it running solid-solid, all right.”

“I’m glad to hear it, sir.” Chester wondered what the youngster’s notions of solid were. He hadn’t got shot in six weeks, but what did that prove? Not much, as Chester knew too well.

Second Lieutenant Husak didn’t want to leave it alone. “Commanding a platoon is an important responsibility,” he said, which only proved he didn’t understand his place in the world. Lieutenants in charge of platoons had the company CO above them and a senior noncom below to fix things if they screwed up too badly. Doing all right meant you were training for a real role. Not doing all right probably meant getting wounded or killed, and certainly meant you’d never see another promotion. Husak went on, “What’s the biggest command you ever had, Sergeant?”

All right, sonny boy. You asked for it. “Sir, I led a company for a while in the last war, over in northern Virginia.”

“What?” Husak’s voice went high and shrill. By the way he jerked, he might have sat on a tack. “How could you do that?”

“Usual way, sir: all the officers were killed or wounded,” Martin answered stolidly. “This was 1917, sir, and we were almost as beaten down and beat up as the Confederates were. Eventually they got around to putting a lieutenant in the slot, so I got bumped back down again, but I had it for a month or so.”

“Oh.” Husak looked as if he wanted to call him a liar, but he didn’t have the nerve. Chester’s matter-of-fact account was impossible to contradict, especially for someone who’d been making messes in his drawers in 1917. The young lieutenant also looked as if he hated Chester and as if he was scared to death of him, both at once. He jerked a thumb towards a waiting truck. “Hop in. We’ll see how you do in the war we’ve got now.”

“Yes, sir.” As Chester did, he called himself seventeen different kinds of idiot. For this sour little punk he’d walked away from his wife, his son, and a pretty damn good slot in the construction business? What had those bastards at the recruiting station put in his coffee? Whatever it was, they should have used it against the Confederates instead. It would have made them quit without a fight.

The other replacements got in after him. Husak did, too. He spent a lot less time on them than he had on Chester. The PFC–Chester thought his name was Fitzpatrick, though he looked more Italian than Irish-sent him a sympathetic look, but with the lieutenant in the truck with them that was all he could do.

“Move out,” Husak called to the driver.

“Yes, sir.” The man fired up the engine, put the truck in gear, and started west. Chester sighed softly. Back to the war, dammit, he thought.

Instead, the war came to him, and within ten minutes. The truck, which had been rumbling along at a good clip, slowed and then stopped. The driver leaned on his horn. Lieutenant Husak went up to the little window that separated the rear compartment from the driver’s and shouted, “What the hell?”

“Refugees.” The driver’s answer was equally laconic.

“Jesus Christ!” Husak clapped a hand to his forehead.

A few seconds later, Martin, who could only see where he’d been, not where he was going, got a look out the back of the truck at the detritus of war. By the time he’d got to Virginia, all the civilians who’d wanted to leave the combat zone were long gone. Here, a woman stared at him out of eyes as empty and exhausted as those of an overworked draft animal. Sweat plastered her hair to her head; her freckled skin was badly sunburned. She had a knapsack on her back and a crude harness rigged from bed sheets on her chest that let her carry a howling toddler there. A little girl of four or five clung to one hand, a boy a year or two older to the other.

Beside her stood a man in a battered straw hat pushing a wheelbarrow that held whatever he’d been able to distill of his life. He hadn’t shaved for a week or so. His checked shirt was filthy, his dungarees were out at the knees, and his shoes out at the toes. He looked as weary and as beaten as the woman.

Except as an obstacle, they and the others like them ignored the truck. They flowed around it, flowed past it-and kept the men in it from getting to where they could do anything about stopping the Confederate advance that had set the refugees in motion in the first place.

A Model T that edged around the truck held-Chester counted carefully-fourteen people. He wouldn’t have bet you could cram that many in as a stunt. This was no stunt; it was, literally, life and death. The ancient flivver ran, even if it sagged on its springs.

“Lord, what a fuckup,” the PFC said softly. Chester nodded and lit yet another cigarette. That was about the size of it.

Lieutenant Husak, meanwhile, started throwing a fit. “We’ve got to clear these people!” he yelled. “How are we supposed to fight a war if civilians keep getting in the way?” Civilians getting in the way weren’t an accidental consequence of Confederate attacks; Featherston’s men knew they would, and took advantage of it. Husak turned to the soldiers with him. “You men! Fix bayonets and get these refugees off the road. If an Asskicker comes by, we’re sitting ducks, and so are they.”

He wasn’t wrong. Chester hadn’t used his bayonet for anything but a knife and a can opener since the Great War. He put it on the business end of his Springfield now. It was still good for intimidating civilians.

“Get out of the road!” he shouted as he hopped down from the truck. He did his best to sound like a traffic cop. “Come on, people-move it! You’re blocking military traffic! You’ve got to get out of the way!”

Had the truck been full of soldiers, he would have got results faster. It wasn’t so easy with only half a dozen men at his back. The civilians didn’t want to listen. All they wanted was to get away from the Confederates. They returned to the highway as soon as Chester and his comrades went by.

And then a Confederate dive bomber did spot the column and the halted truck.

Chester knew what that scream in the sky was as soon as he heard it. “Hit the dirt!” he yelled, and took his own advice, scrambling away as fast as he could. The PFC dove for cover, too. The rest of the soldiers and the civilians were still mostly upright when the Mule machine-gunned them, dropped a bomb right in front of the truck, and roared back toward the west.

Screams. Shrieks. Raw terror. People running every which way. People down and bleeding-some writhing and howling, others lying still. Pieces of people flung improbably far. The truck going up like Vesuvius. Whatever problems Lieutenant Husak had with his temper, he’d never fix them now.

And now there was even more chaos and delay on the road than there had been before. Chester looked around. With the lieutenant dead, he was the highest-ranking man here. He wanted the responsibility about as much as he wanted a root canal. Want it or not, it had just landed in his lap. He got up and started doing what little he could to set things right.

Despite its quaint name, Tom Colleton found himself liking Beaver, Pennsylvania. The town sat in the middle of a mining and industrial belt near the border with Ohio, but was itself pleasant and tree-shrouded. He’d commandeered the ivy-covered Quay House, former home of a prominent Socialist politician, for his regimental headquarters.

The runner from division HQ, a few miles farther south, caught up with him there. After saluting, the corporal said, “Sir, I have a special order for you.”

It must have been special, or his superiors would have sent it by wireless or field telephone, enciphering it if they thought they had to. Tom nodded. “Give it to me, then.”

He expected the messenger to pull out a piece of paper for him to read and then destroy. Instead, it came orally. The powers that be really didn’t want anything that had to do with it falling into U.S. hands. “Sir, you are ordered to allow a special unit to pass through your lines, and to make sure the troops under your command do nothing to interfere with this special unit in any way.”

That said just enough to leave Lieutenant-Colonel Colleton scratching his head. “Of course I’ll obey, but I’d like to know a little more about what I’m obeying,” he said. “Why would my men want to interfere with this special unit, whatever it is? How can I tell them not to if I don’t know why it’ll cause trouble?”

“Sir, I was told you’d likely ask that question, and that I was allowed to answer it,” the corporal said seriously. “The answer is, this special unit is made up of men who can talk like damnyankees. They wear Yankee uniforms and act like U.S. soldiers.”

“Son of a bitch!” Colleton exclaimed. Whatever he’d expected, that wasn’t it. After a moment, he wondered why not. Troops like that could raise merry hell behind enemy lines. Of course, they’d have a short life and not a merry one if they got captured. But that was their lookout, not his. He asked, “How will they get up here without having some overeager kid in butternut shoot their asses off?”

He won a smile from the runner. “They’ve come this far, sir,” the corporal said. “They’ll have escorts who look the way they’re supposed to. And they’ll move up at night, when they’re less likely to be noticed.”

“All right. Makes sense.” Tom wondered if the special unit had come up from the CSA entirely by night, lying quiet and hidden by day. He couldn’t think of any better way to keep his own side from trying to kill them. He asked, “Can you tell me anything about what they’ll be doing?”

“No, sir,” the messenger answered. “They didn’t tell me, so I couldn’t tell the damnyankees in case I got caught.”

“Fair enough-that makes sense, too,” Tom said. “What time can I expect ’em? My men will need some warning.”

“They should get here about eleven o’clock,” the messenger said. “Please don’t brief your men too soon. If they get captured, or if they just start bragging to damnyankee pickets…”

“I understand.” What Tom understood was that he was between a rock and a hard place. His men did need warning, or they would do their best to murder the ersatz Yankees. If he had to hold off till the last minute for fear of breaching security, some of them might not get the word. “I’ll do what needs doing.”

“Yes, sir.” The corporal saluted. “If you’ll excuse me…” He headed back toward division HQ, presumably bearing word that the special unit could come ahead.

Tom shook his head in wonder. Then he got on the field telephone with his company commanders, trying to find out where U.S. lines in front of him were most porous. “What’s cooking, sir?” one of his captains asked. “We going to sneak raiders through?”

“You might say so, Bobby Lee,” Tom answered. “You’ve got the quiet sector, so you win the cigar. Alert your men that the infiltrators will have escorts, and that they are to follow the orders they get from those escorts. Got it?”

“Well enough to do what I’m told,” the captain answered plaintively. “Something funny’s going on, though, isn’t it?”

“You don’t know the half of it.” Tom didn’t want to go into detail on the telephone. The damnyankees were better than he wished they were at tapping telephone lines. He didn’t know some U.S. noncom with earphones was listening to every word he said, but he didn’t want to elaborate on what was going to happen, not when his own superiors had gone out of their way to keep from sending anything on the air or over the wires.

With his own curiosity aroused, he waited impatiently for nightfall. Somewhere off to the north, artillery rumbled. His own area stayed pretty quiet. He supposed his superiors wanted it that way. If the Confederate soldiers dressed as Yankees were going to cause the most trouble, they ought to go in where the real enemy wasn’t keyed up and ready to start shooting at anything that moved.

Trucks rumbled into Beaver a few minutes past eleven. A Confederate major in proper uniform alighted from the first one and came looking for Tom. After being directed to the Quay House, he said, “Here we are, sir. You’ve been warned about us?”

“I sure have,” Tom Colleton answered.

“Good,” the major said. “Please bring some men with you to form a screen around the, ah, special soldiers as they go forward. We don’t want to have any unfortunate accidents.”

We don’t want the ordinary soldiers shooting up the special men, he meant. Tom nodded. “I understand, Major. I agree one hundred percent.”

Nobody had got out of the trucks a couple of blocks away. Tom rounded up a couple of squads’ worth of clerks and technicians and other rear-echelon troops and had them surround the silent vehicles. “What’s up, sir?” one of them asked, reasonably enough.

“Don’t be surprised and don’t start shooting when you see who gets out of these trucks,” Tom answered. “No matter what these men look like, they aren’t real damnyankees. They’re infiltrators. They’re going to cause trouble behind the enemy’s lines. If this goes well, it’ll make the advance on Pittsburgh a hell of a lot easier.” He turned to the major. “All right?”

“Couldn’t be better, sir. Thanks.” The major raised his voice: “You can come out now, boys!”

Tom’s men swore softly as the faux Yankees emerged. He couldn’t blame them; he muttered under his breath, too. They looked much too much like the real thing. Their uniforms and helmets were the ones he’d been shooting at for more than a year. They wore U.S. shoes and carried U.S. weapons. And, when they spoke, they sounded like damnyankees, too. That really made the hair on his arms and at the back of his neck want to stand on end.

One of his men said, “Sir, you sure these bastards is on our side?”

“If I was a real Yankee, I’d shoot you for that, you son of a bitch,” one of the men said. He wore a sergeant’s uniform, and sounded like a cocky noncom… a cocky noncom from New York City. He could have taken his act to the stage. In fact, he was taking it to the stage-and a bad review would cost him his neck.

“Come on,” Tom said. “I’ll take you up to the line. One of my companies is facing a sector where the enemy doesn’t really have much of a line in place against us-that’s what happens sometimes when you push hard.”

“Good,” the major said. “Can you start a little firefight somewhere else to distract the Yankees some more?”

The request made sense, even if it would get some of his men wounded or killed. “I’ll take care of it,” he said, and sent the order over the field telephone. A machine gun and some riflemen opened up off to the right. The enemy returned fire. Springfields sounded very different from automatic Tredegars. Machine guns differed, too. The U.S. weapons were closely related to their Great War ancestors. The C.S. model was lighter, cooled by air rather than a clumsy water jacket, and designed to put out absolutely as much lead as possible. It sounded like nothing so much as a giant tearing up an enormous sheet of cloth: the individual rounds going off blended into an almost continuous roar.

“All right, Major,” Tom told the officer in charge of the imitation Yankees when they got to the perimeter. “I’ve done what I can do. The rest is up to you and your boys. Good luck.”

“Thank you kindly, sir.” The major, at least, sounded like a proper Confederate. He turned to the men in his charge. “Come on. Y’all know the drill.”

“Yeah.” “Sure thing.” “No problem.” Those laconic grunts sounded as if they came from the wrong side of the border. One of the men muttered, “Goddamn cowflop cigarettes from now on.” Tom sympathized with that. Everybody knew how eager Yankees were for Confederate tobacco.

A few at a time, the Confederates in U.S. uniform slipped off into the night. Tom waited tensely. If gunfire erupted right in front of him, something had gone wrong up there. But everything stayed quiet. Could they have the passwords for this sector? If the enemy had any brains, he would change those every day. Tom knew his own side wasn’t perfect at that. He supposed the Yankees also were unlikely to be.

Everything stayed quiet. However the infiltrators were doing it, they were doing it. The company commander said, “If that doesn’t buy us a breakthrough, nothing will.”

Even talking about breakthroughs made a Great War veteran nervous. “We’ll see what happens, that’s all, Bobby Lee,” Tom answered. “And I reckon we’d better tighten up our own procedures.”

“What do you mean, sir?” Bobby Lee asked.

“What goes around comes around,” Tom answered. “You don’t suppose the damnyankees have men who sound like they come from the CSA? You don’t suppose they can get their hands on our weapons and uniforms? Like hell they can’t. I think we came up with this one first-I hope to God we did-but we’re liable to be on the receiving end one day.”

“Son of a bitch,” the young captain said. “My hat’s off to you, sir.” He took himself literally, doffing his helmet.

Tom snorted. “Never mind that. Just have our men ready to move fast if the order comes.”

“Yes, sir. They will be, sir,” Bobby Lee promised.

By the time Tom got back to Beaver, the buses that brought in the phony U.S. soldiers had gone. But Confederate barrels-with, he devoutly hoped, real Confederates inside them-were rumbling into town.

The storm broke the next afternoon. The barrels slammed into the shaky U.S. position, and it turned out to be even shakier than anybody would have expected. Enemy reinforcements showed up late, showed up in the wrong places, or didn’t show up at all. Unlike a lot of people, Tom Colleton had a pretty good notion of why that was so. He wondered what it was costing the Confederates in U.S. green-gray. We’d better make it worthwhile, he thought, and pushed his own men forward without mercy.

Jonathan Moss mooched back toward the barracks at the Andersonville POW camp from the latrine trenches. Nick Cantarella was coming the other way. He gave Moss a sour nod. “They still have guys looking up your ass when you take a crap?” he asked.

“Just about,” Moss answered. They both rolled their eyes. Ever since that downpour made part of the U.S. escape tunnel fall in on itself, the Confederates had been as jumpy as mice at a cat’s wedding. Moss knew they had every reason to be. Knowing it didn’t make him like it any better.

“Such fun,” Cantarella said. The Confederates still didn’t know who’d built the tunnel. That Cantarella kept on walking around proved as much. If the guards had had any idea what was what, he would have been in solitary confinement or manacles or leg irons or ball and chain or whatever else they thought up to keep POWs from absquatulating.

“I wonder if anyone has anything else going on,” Moss remarked.

“You never can tell,” said the captain from New York. “One of these days, the guards are liable to wake up and find out we’ve all flown the coop. What do they do then? Jump off a cliff? Here’s hoping.”

“Yeah. Here’s hoping.” Moss knew his own voice sounded hollow. He wanted out. He wanted out so bad he could taste it. He wasn’t the only POW who did, of course. The guards knew as much, too. They’d known that even before the tunnel collapsed. Now, with their noses rubbed in it, they tried to keep an eye on everybody all the time.

Wrinkling his own nose, Captain Cantarella walked on toward the latrine trenches. Jonathan Moss ambled back to the barracks. Other POWs nodded to him as he went by. He was one of the boys by now, not a new fish who drew dubious glances wherever he went and whatever he did. Having the enemy suspicious of you was one thing. It came with being a prisoner of war. Having your own side suspicious of you felt a lot worse.

“ ’Day, Major,” First Lieutenant Hal Swinburne said.

“Hello, Hal.” Moss hid a smile at his own thoughts of a moment before. Hal Swinburne hadn’t been at Andersonville very long, but nobody suspected him of being a Confederate plant. For one thing, three officers already incarcerated vouched for him. For another, he was a Yankees’ Yankee: he came from Maine, and spoke with such a thick down-East accent, half his fellow POWs had trouble following him. Moss couldn’t imagine a Confederate plant talking like that.

“Hot today,” Swinburne said mournfully.

“Hot yesterday. Hot tomorrow. Hot the day after, too.” Moss kicked at the red dirt. Dust rose from under his foot. He pointed up into the sky, where big black birds circled. “See those?”

Swinburne looked, shielding his eyes with the palm of his hand. He was about six-one, on the skinny side, with dark blond hair and a thin little mustache that almost disappeared if you looked at it from the wrong angle. “Ravens?” he asked.

Did you see ravens soaring over the Maine woods? Moss wouldn’t have been surprised. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen one, but he was no birdwatcher. He did know the birds he was watching now weren’t ravens. “Vultures,” he said solemnly. “Waiting for something to fall over dead from the sun so they can come down and have dinner.”

“Vultures.” The way Swinburne said it, it sounded like vuhchaaz. He nodded. “Ayuh. Seen ’em on the field, time or two. Nasty birds.” He stretched out the a in nasty and swallowed the r in birds. After wiping his forehead with the back of his hand, he went on, “How do folks live in weather like this all the time, though?”

People wondered the same thing about Maine, of course, for opposite reasons. Moss said, “I’m from Chicago. I don’t think there’s any kind of weather in the world you don’t see there.”

“That’s not so bad,” Swinburne said. “That’s variety, like. But this here every day?” He shuddered. “I’d cook.”

There was a variation on this theme. When it wasn’t hot and muggy and sunny, it was hot and muggy and pouring rain. Moss didn’t bother pointing that out. He doubted the other POW would find it an improvement.

With another nod, Hal Swinburne went on his way. He didn’t move any faster than he had to. In this heat and humidity, nobody moved any faster than he had to. Sweat coated Moss’ skin, thick and heavy as grease. It welded his shirt and even his trousers to his body.

Coming into the shade inside the barracks hall was a small relief, but only a small one. “A little warm out there,” Moss remarked.

That made even the men in the unending corner poker game look up. “Really?” one of them said.

“Never would have guessed,” another added.

“Come on, Major,” a third poker player put in. “You knew hell was supposed to be hot, right?”

Moss laughed. A moment later, he wondered why. If this wasn’t hell, it had to be one of the nastier suburbs of purgatory. He went over to Colonel Summers. “Could I talk with you for a moment, sir?” he asked.

The senior U.S. officer in the camp nodded. “Certainly.” He closed the beat-up paperbound mystery he’d been reading. “I already know who done it, anyhow.” Moss knew who done it in that one, too. The camp library didn’t hold enough books. Anyone who’d been here for a while and liked to read had probably gone through all of them at least once. Monty Summers got to his feet. “What’s on your mind, Major?”

Till they walked outside again, Moss kept it to small talk. Summers didn’t seem surprised or put out. When Moss was sure neither guards nor fellow prisoners could overhear, he asked, “Are we still working on an escape?”

“Officially, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Colonel Summers answered. “Officially, I had no idea there was a tunnel under these grounds till the rain showed it. I was shocked-shocked, I tell you-to learn that some men here were planning to break out. The Confederates couldn’t prove any different, either. I’m glad they couldn’t. It would have been troublesome if they could.”

He wouldn’t admit a damn thing. That was bound to be smart. The less he said, the less the Confederates could make him sorry for. The less Moss heard, the less the enemy could squeeze out of him. All the same… “I do believe I’m going to go smack out of my mind if I stay cooped up here much longer.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t,” Summers said. “They’ll put you in a straitjacket, and those things are uncomfortable as the devil, especially in this weather.”

“Yes, sir,” Moss said resignedly. He should have known he wouldn’t get a straight answer. As a matter of fact, he had known it, or had a pretty good idea. That he’d squawked anyhow was a telling measure of how fed up and cooped up he was feeling.

Voice far drier than the dripping air they both breathed, Summers said, “Believe me, Major, you aren’t the only one incompletely satisfied with the accommodations around here.”

“No?” Moss’ spirits revived, or tried to. “Is there anyone in particular I should talk to? Is anybody besides me especially unhappy about them?”

“If someone is, I’m sure he’ll get in touch with you,” Colonel Summers said, which again told Moss nothing. “Was anything else troubling you? As I say, you’re not the only one who doesn’t like it here. Remember that and you may keep from winning one of the guards a furlough.”

“Bastards,” Moss muttered. The POWs didn’t know for a fact that their guards got time off for shooting a prisoner who’d set foot on the smoothed ground just inside the barbed wire-or, sometimes, for shooting a prisoner who looked as if he was about to do such a thing. They didn’t know it, but they believed it the way a lot of them believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ.

“Of course they’re bastards,” Summers said. “They get paid to be bastards. You don’t want to make things easy for them, do you?”

“Well, no, sir,” Moss said.

“Good.” Summers nodded in a businesslike way. “I should hope not.” He waved to Lieutenant Swinburne, who was on his way back to the barracks. “What do you think of the guards, Lieutenant?”

“Me, sir? Pack of bastards,” Swinburne answered at once. The word was bahstuds in his mouth, giving it only a vague resemblance to what Moss had called the guards.

“Thanks. I couldn’t have put that better myself,” Summers said. The officer from Maine touched his cap with a forefinger and went on his way. Colonel Summers turned back to Moss. “You see? You’re not the only one who loves these people.”

“I never said I was, sir.” Moss scowled. “I’ve got more right to complain than he does. I’ve been here longer.”

“Yes, but they interrogate him more. They’ve already squeezed everything out of you that they’re going to get,” Summers said. “He’s new, so they still have hopes.”

“If there’s more than three Confederate officers between here and Richmond who don’t know my name, rank, and pay number, I’d be amazed. And not a goddamn one of them knows anything but that.” Moss spoke with a certain somber pride.

“They’ve grilled all of us, Major,” Summers replied, wearily rolling his eyes as if to say, Haven’t they just! “I know they get more out of some people than they do from others.” He held up a hasty hand. “I’m not talking about you, and I’m not talking about Swinburne, either.”

“I know, sir. I understood that. Some men will talk more than others, and they lean on some harder than others, depending on what they think the poor sons of bitches know.” Moss sighed. “I can’t even cuss ’em for that, or not real hard, because I know damn well we do the same thing.”

Monty Summers shrugged. “It’s war,” he said: two words that covered a multitude of sins. “We all do the best we can.”

“Yes, sir,” Moss agreed mournfully. “And look what that’s got us.” His wave encompassed the camp. “God knows what would have happened if we tried to screw up.”

“Heh,” Colonel Summers said-a noise that sounded like a laugh but wasn’t. “A hell of a lot of people who didn’t do their best are dead right now.”

“Oh, yes, sir,” Moss agreed. “And some of them are back in Philadelphia with stars on their shoulder straps. They’re drinking good booze and eating steaks and screwing their secretaries. For them, the war’s a nuisance or an opportunity, depending on how you look at things.”

Summers eyed him for a long moment before saying, “That holds on both sides of the border, you know.”

“I sure hope so, sir,” Moss said. “But what worries me is, the Confederates may have done a better job of sweeping away their deadwood than we have, and that’s liable to cost us. It’s liable to cost us a lot.”