Drive to the East

XVI

Some lovely rubble lay between Sergeant Michael Pound’s barrel and the advancing Confederate armor. Once upon a time, the rubble had been homes and shops and people’s hopes. All things considered, Pound liked it better as rubble. If you knocked a wall down in a neighborhood that hadn’t been trampled, the enemy would notice right away. If you rearranged what was already wreckage, though, so what?

Not many Pittsburgh neighborhoods had gone untrampled. The United States were making a stand here, defying the Confederates to drive them out. Jake Featherston seemed willing, even eager, to try. He keep feeding men and barrels and artillery and airplanes into the fight. No matter who held Pittsburgh by the time the battle here was done, one thing was clear: it wouldn’t be worth holding.

Pound tapped Lieutenant Don Griffiths on the leg. “Sir, do you think we could crawl inside that ruined-garage, I guess it used to be-over there? We’ve got a nice field of fire where the window was, and the shadows inside’ll keep the bastards in butternut from spotting us.”

The barrel commander stuck his head out of the cupola for a good look. He had nerve; nobody could say he didn’t. And he seemed to own more in the way of sense than the late Lieutenant Poffenberger, anyway. When he ducked back down again, he said, “Good idea, Sergeant,” and spoke to the driver by intercom. Jouncing over shattered brickwork, the barrel took its new position.

Another reason Pound liked the ruined garage was that he’d seen U.S. infantrymen huddled in the ruins not far away. Your own foot soldiers were the best insurance policy you had in a barrel. They kept the other side’s foot soldiers away. No sneaky bastard could plant a magnetic mine on your side, chuck a grenade through an open hatch, or throw a Featherston Fizz at your engine compartment so the flaming gasoline dripped down through the louvers and set you on fire, not if you had pals around.

He spotted motion up ahead through the gunsight. Not the dinosaurian shape of a Confederate barrel rumbling into position, but… “Sir, they’re moving infantry up.”

“Yes, I saw them, too,” Griffiths answered. “Hold fire for now. Let our own infantry deal with them if they can. We’ve got this good position. I don’t want to give it away for something as small as a few soldiers on foot.”

“Yes, sir.” Pound surprised himself by smiling at the lieutenant. What Griffiths said made perfectly good sense. Pound wouldn’t have thought the junior officer had it in him.

Confederate Asskickers screamed down out of the sky to bomb and machine-gun U.S. positions. What seemed like every antiaircraft gun in the world opened up on them. So many guns blazed away, Pound wondered if some of them hadn’t kept quiet before to lure the Confederate dive bombers into a trap. Three or four Mules didn’t pull up from their dives, but went straight into the ground. The explosions made the ground shake under his barrel. He saw one funeral pyre through the hole that had held the garage window.

“Good riddance,” he muttered.

“Amen,” Cecil Bergman said. The loader added, “See anything out there that needs killing, Sarge?”

“Quiet right now,” Pound answered.

“Good,” Bergman said-not a bloodthirsty attitude, but a sensible one. Nobody in his right mind was eager for combat. You had a job to do, you did it, and you tried not to think about it. When you had to think about it, you thought about targets and barrels. You didn’t think about men. Because those sons of bitches on the other side had a job to do, too, and theirs was turning you into a target. If that also meant turning you into raw hamburger or burnt hamburger, they would try not to think about it.

“Somebody coming over to us,” Griffiths said, and then, “He’s in our uniform.”

“Right,” Pound said, and pulled the.45 on his belt out of its holster. Confederates in U.S. uniform, Confederates who talked like U.S. soldiers, had caused a lot of grief in Pennsylvania. “Make sure he’s got the right countersign before you let him get close.”

“I intend to, Sergeant.” Griffiths sounded like a small boy reproving his mother. The barrel commander popped out of the cupola. “Foxx!” he said.

“Greenberg,” the soldier answered. Michael Pound relaxed-mostly. That was the right countersign. The Confederates had their own football heroes. They were unlikely to know the names of a couple of U.S. running backs. Of course, they might have captured a prisoner and torn the countersign out of him. Pound didn’t relax all the way.

He was glad to see Lieutenant Griffiths didn’t, either. “That’s close enough, soldier. I don’t know you,” Griffiths said. Pound grinned, down there where nobody but Cecil Bergman could see him. Maybe the lieutenant wasn’t such a little boy after all.

“Yes, sir,” the man in green-gray said. “Just wanted to let you know Featherston’s fuckers have armor coming forward. One of our artillery-spotting airplanes saw the barrels.”

“All right-thanks,” Griffiths said. The soldier sketched a salute and left. Griffiths ducked down into the turret. “What do you think, Sergeant?”

Pound had enormous respect for artillery spotters. They flew low and slow, and often got shot down. But that had only so much to do with the lieutenant’s question. “Well, sir, if he’s legit we’ll find out pretty soon,” Pound said.

“Yes,” Griffiths said. “But that kind of message can’t hurt us, so he must be the real thing, right?”

“Well, no, sir, not quite,” Pound answered patiently. “He could have had a harmless message just waiting in case we were on our toes. If he did, he’s out there looking for somebody else to screw.”

“Oh,” Griffiths said in a hangdog voice. “I didn’t think of that.” A moment later, softly and to himself, he added, “Dammit!”

“Don’t worry about it, sir,” Pound said. “You did what you were supposed to do. Nobody could ask for anything more.”

“I’m supposed to see more than you do, though.” The barrel commander sounded fretful. “If I don’t, then you ought to be the officer.”

“I don’t want to be an officer, sir,” Pound said for what had to be the hundredth time in his career. Senior enlisted men were supposed to curb junior officers’ enthusiasms. That was at least as important a part of their job as anything else. Most junior officers didn’t know it. Pound didn’t know how to say it without offending the lieutenant. If he didn’t say anything, Griffiths couldn’t get his ass in a sling. He kept quiet.

A few minutes later, the Confederates laid on an artillery barrage. Griffiths kept the hatch up on the cupola as long as he could. When gas rounds started gurgling in, though, he clanged it shut. “Button up!” he yelled over the intercom to the driver and bow gunner. Then he put on his gas mask. Resignedly, Pound did the same. With autumn here, wearing it wasn’t so awful as it had been during the summer. Even so, it cut down his vision, and it was awkward to use with a gunsight. Lieutenant Griffiths had an even harder time seeing out the cupola periscopes through his mask’s portholes.

Shrapnel clanged off the barrel’s chassis. A barrage like this wasn’t dangerous to armor except in case of an unlucky direct hit. Pound traversed the turret so the big gun-the pretty big gun, anyway-bore on the approach route he would use if he were a Confederate barrel commander. Griffiths set a hand on his shoulder to say he understood and approved.

Not much later, the barrel commander sang out: “Front!”

“Identified,” Pound answered-he saw the ugly beast, too. “Range 350.”

“You lined up on him so nicely, Sergeant,” Griffiths said. “Go ahead and do the honors.”

“Yes, sir,” Pound said, and then, to Bergman, “Armor-piercing.”

“Armor-piercing,” the loader echoed, and slammed a round in the breech.

Pound adjusted the main armament’s elevation just a little. The C.S. barrel came on, sure nothing nasty was in the neighborhood. Pound wouldn’t have been that confident. The enemy machine was one of the new models. Maybe that made the commander feel invulnerable. Infantrymen in butternut loped alongside, automatic rifles at the ready.

The U.S. barrel’s gun spoke. Pound’s mask kept out the cordite fumes. The shell casing clanged on the fighting compartment floor. “Hit!” Lieutenant Griffiths yelled. “That’s a hit!”

Smoke and fire spurted from the stricken C.S. barrel. The U.S. bow gunner opened up on the Confederate foot soldiers. One of them spun, his rifle flying out of his hands. He crumpled, right out there in the open. Other Confederate soldiers went down, too. They were more likely diving for cover than hit. Nobody came out of the barrel. Flames and a cloud of smoke burst from the cupola hatch. Five men dead, Pound thought, and then, Well, they wanted to kill me. I like it better this way.

He tapped Lieutenant Griffiths. “Sir, shouldn’t we move out of here and find another firing position? Next enemy barrel that comes this way is going to know where we’re at. Most ambushes only work once.”

“Good point,” the barrel commander said, and then, over the intercom to the driver, “Back us out, Mancatelli. Shift us over behind that pile of bricks to the left.”

He hadn’t been ready to move quite soon enough, but he’d had a backup firing position in mind when he did. It was a pretty good one, too; Michael Pound would have suggested it if Griffiths hadn’t seen it himself. But he had. No, he wasn’t such a helpless puppy after all.

After the barrel backed out of the garage, Mancatelli stayed in reverse long enough to move forward toward the secondary position. That kept the front glacis plate and the front of the turret facing the direction from which the barrel was likeliest to take fire. It avoided exposing the machine’s thinner side armor. Those who served in barrels knew their weaknesses best-except, maybe, for those who tried to destroy them.

Peering out through the gunsight, Pound saw soldiers in butternut pointing to where the barrel had been. That probably meant they were warning it was still there. Nobody pointed toward the wreckage behind which it now hunkered down. If a machine weighing upwards of twenty tons could be sneaky, this one had just done the trick.

And here came a pair of Confederate barrels. “Front!” Griffiths sang out. “The one on the right, Sergeant.”

“Identified,” Pound acknowledged. “Bergman, we’re going to have to do this fast as hell, because that other bastard will start shooting at us as soon as we nail his pal.” He assumed he would nail the first barrel; he had all the arrogance a good gunner should. As he traversed the turret, he added, “So give me two rounds of armor-piercing, fast as you can, when I say, ‘Now.’… Now!”

The first round clanged home. Pound fired. He got his hit, on the enemy barrel’s turret. The second round was in the breech well before he’d brought the gun to bear on the second Confederate barrel-and the new turret had a hydraulic traverse, too, a feature he adored. His gun and the enemy’s belched fire at the same instant. The C.S. barrel burst into flames. The Confederate’s round slammed into the rubble, slammed through the rubble, but slowed enough so that it clanged off the U.S. barrel’s glacis plate instead of penetrating.

“Two hits! Two!” Griffiths yelled. He pounded Pound on the back. Cecil Bergman thumped him on the leg, which was the only part of him the loader could reach. They both told him what a wonderful fellow he was.

“Thank you, sir,” he said to Griffiths. Then he added, “I’d like to go on being wonderful a while longer, too, so could we please find another firing position?”

Griffiths laughed, but the barrel moved. That was all that really mattered.

Night came earlier now. As autumn deepened, U.S. bombers could spend more time above Richmond and other Confederate cities. Jake Featherston hated that as much as he loved C.S. bombers’ being able to spend more time over cities in the United States.

Except for that, night and day meant little to him in the shelter under what was left of the Gray House. He slept in odd chunks, a couple of hours here, three there, and stayed awake in equally odd chunks between the stretches of sleep.

Everyone around him had to adapt to that. If Jake was awake at four in the morning and needed to talk to Nathan Bedford Forrest III, Forrest could damn well get his ass over to the Gray House at four in the morning. The same went for Ferd Koenig and Clarence Potter and Saul Goldman and Lulu and the rest of his inner circle. He seemed to thrive on his erratic sleep schedule. No one else did.

Lulu stuck her head into his underground office. She was paler than she should have been. She didn’t get up into the sun and fresh air as often as she should these days. Jake suspected he was paler than he should have been, too. He didn’t like being stuck down here, but he didn’t like getting blown up, either.

“General Forrest is here to see you, Mr. President,” she said.

“Well, send him on in,” Jake replied. “Did he tell you what it was all about?” Forrest had asked for this meeting; Jake hadn’t summoned him. The chief of the General Staff had been coy about saying just what was on his mind, too.

But Featherston’s secretary shook her head. “No, sir.”

“All right. Never mind. I’ll find out,” Jake said.

Nathan Bedford Forrest III strode into the office and saluted. “Mr. President,” he said, and then, “Freedom!” and then, “May I shut the door?”

“Go ahead,” Featherston answered. Forrest had a pistol in his holster. He was one of the handful of men allowed to bear arms in Jake’s presence. Jake didn’t think Forrest had come here to plug him. If Forrest had, he wouldn’t waste time with the door. He’d just go ahead and do it. Jake waved him to a chair and asked, “What’s up?”

“Mr. President, it seems to me we’ve done a pretty good job of making Pittsburgh useless to the damnyankees,” Forrest said. “We’ve smashed it up so the steel production there’s gone straight to hell. Most of what the mills do make, the USA can’t get out of the city. Do we really need to hold the ground?”

“Damn straight we do,” Jake said without even a heartbeat’s hesitation. “We need to show those bastards we can beat ’em anywhere we please. And besides, the second we ease up, that town’ll come back to life like a monster in a horror flick. You know it as well as I do, too.”

Forrest looked unhappy. “Sir, what I know is, the damnyankees are chewing up men and barrels and airplanes we can’t afford to lose. They’ve got more people than we do, dammit, and that’s what they’re using. Between us, we and the Yankees’ve knocked Pittsburgh cockeyed. They squat in the ruins and potshoot us.”

“We’ll lick ’em,” Jake declared. “That’s why every infantryman’s got an automatic weapon. Put enough lead in the air and the other guys fall over dead.”

“Sir, it’s not that simple,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said. “Fighting like that, there are no good targets. They make us come to them, and then they make us pay for coming. We’ve got crack regiments knocked down to the size of a couple of companies. Units just aren’t the same when you have to rebuild ’em after losses like that. It’s the same way with barrels. They pick a spot, they wait, and then they shoot first. Their new models aren’t as good as ours, but getting the first shot off counts for a hell of a lot, especially at short range. We’re losing barrels as fast as we can build ’em. And we’re losing veteran crews, too. That just isn’t good terrain for armor to attack in.”

“Whatever we’re losing, they’re losing worse,” Jake said.

Forrest nodded, which didn’t mean he agreed. “Yes, sir. They are,” he said. “But they can afford it better. This is how we got in trouble in the last war.”

He hadn’t been old enough to fight in the last war. Jake had been in it from first day to last. That a pup should have the nerve to tell him what had happened and what hadn’t… “We are going to take Pittsburgh,” Featherston said in a voice like iron. “We are. We’ll take it, and we’ll hold it, and if the damnyankees want it back they’ll have to kiss our ass. That’s the way it’s gonna be, General. Have you got it?”

“Yes, sir.” Nathan Bedford Forrest III got to his feet. He stood at stiff attention. He saluted with machinelike precision. He did a smart about-turn and marched out of the President’s office. He didn’t slam the door. He closed it silently, which was even more sarcastic.

“I haven’t convinced that man,” Jake muttered. But Forrest would follow orders when he got them. That was what soldiers were for. And Pittsburgh would fall. And when it did, the United States would have to make peace. They couldn’t very well fight a war if they didn’t have anything to fight with, could they?

Sometimes the fellows in the fancy uniforms started flabbling over nothing. Forrest hadn’t been one to do that, but he was doing it now. Jake had no doubts. He hardly ever had doubts. That was why he’d got where he was, why the Freedom Party had got where it was. People with doubts stopped before they ought to. If you just kept going, you’d get there. And he was going to get Pittsburgh.

Lulu came in. “Mr. President, Mr. Goldman is here to see you. He says it’s urgent.”

“Well, then, I’d better find out what he wants, eh?” Jake wondered what had gone wrong. Something must have, or Saul wouldn’t come to his office uninvited.

The director of communications gave him the news in three bald words: “Another people bombing.”

“Son of a bitch!” Jake said. “Where? How bad?”

“Jackson, Mississippi, sir,” Goldman answered. “A waiter at a restaurant there last night. It was crowded-some kind of ladies’ club function. Eleven known dead, at least forty hurt.”

“Plus the nigger, of course,” Featherston said.

“Yes, sir. Plus him. Two other waiters were also injured.” Goldman paused. “How do you want to treat this, Mr. President? I hate to say it, but keeping quiet about what the Mormons are doing in the USA hasn’t worked.”

Jake knew why he hated to say it: saying it meant saying Jake Featherston was wrong. But Goldman had said it, and Jake couldn’t very well claim not talking about people bombs had kept them from scarring the CSA. He made a discontented noise down deep in his throat. He wanted to say exactly that. But he had to deal with the truth, no matter how little he liked it.

He thought for a few seconds, then nodded to himself. “All right. Here’s how we’ll play it. You can splash this one all over the papers, Saul. A ladies’ club, you say? Make it an atrocity story to end all atrocity stories, then. Nigger murders Confederate white women! That’ll make people’s blood boil. And you can let folks know all the coons’ll pay for what that one bastard went and did.”

Goldman didn’t always show everything he thought. By the way he brightened now, that was what he’d wanted to hear, and he’d wanted very much to hear it. “Yes, sir, Mr. President!” he said, enthusiasm bubbling in his voice. “That sounds like just the right line to take. I’ll handle everything. Don’t you worry about it.”

“I don’t,” Jake said simply. “If I worried about the way you did your job, Saul, somebody else would be doing it, and you can take that to the bank.”

“Uh, yes, sir,” Goldman said. Jake didn’t want him scared, so he made himself smile. That did the trick. Goldman got to his feet and said, “I’ll get right on it. If you’ll excuse me…?”

“Go on, go on,” Featherston said indulgently. The director of communications hurried away. Jake got on the telephone. “Ferd?… You heard about the shit that happened in Jackson?… Yeah, Saul told me just now. Eleven dead plus the nigger! Jesus Christ!.. How fast can you get the Party mobilized to help the cops and soldiers?… That quick? Good!.. By this time Thursday, then, I don’t want one nigger left in Jackson-not one, you hear me? And when they get where they’re going, I don’t want ’em hanging around, either… You see to it, that’s all. ’Bye.” He hung up-he slammed down the telephone, as a matter of fact.

He wasted a few seconds swearing at the Mormons. Those damned fanatics had come up with a weapon other fanatics could use. Mississippi and Alabama had been in revolt since he took office, and they hadn’t been what anybody would call calm even before that. Too damn many coons, that was all there was to it. Well, he aimed to thin ’em out. And what he aimed at, he got.

He wondered whom Lulu would announce when she came in again. Instead of announcing anybody, she asked, “When was the last time you ate something, Mr. President?”

“Why-” Before Jake could finish talking, his stomach let out a rumble you could hear across the room. “Been a while, I guess,” he said sheepishly.

“I’ll get the kitchens to send you something.” She wagged a finger at him. “You’ve got to take care of yourself, you know.”

“Right,” Jake said. “I have been busy, you know.” He was amazed at how defensive he sounded. He could ream out the chief of the General Staff and stop him in his tracks. His own secretary? That was a whole different story. What made the difference? Lulu was right, and Nathan Bedford Forrest III damn well wasn’t. So he told himself, anyhow.

Not ten minutes later, Lulu came back with a tray with two thick roast-beef sandwiches, potato salad, and a bottle of beer. Jake got outside the food in nothing flat. He did feel better afterwards. He wasn’t about to admit it to her. On the other hand, he didn’t have to-she would already know.

His restless energy burned off what he ate and left him with the same lanky frame he’d had half a lifetime before. He knew he wasn’t as strong as he had been then, though. He wasn’t fat, but his muscles had gone soft and slack. He didn’t get the exercise he once had. Manhandling a field gun was a lot tougher physically than being President of the CSA and running things from behind a desk.

“I ought to put in time every day at… something hard, anyway,” he muttered to himself. “Something, dammit.” When you got past fifty, you had to take care of yourself the way you took care of a motorcar. You’d break down if you didn’t, and replacement parts for your carcass were mighty hard to come by.

But he had no idea what to do to keep fit. He couldn’t imagine himself playing golf or riding a bicycle or anything like that. Plain old calisthenics, like the ones from his Army days, were too boring to stand without a drill sergeant making you do them. And where would he find the time, anyway? He didn’t have time to do everything he needed to do now.

He muttered again, this time blasphemously. He knew what would happen. He wouldn’t find the time, and then six months or a year from now he’d be even angrier and more disgusted with himself, because he’d be that much further out of shape. He didn’t have any good answers, though. The only way he could find the time to exercise was to stop being President. He wasn’t about to do that.

Some of his pilots took pep pills to stay awake when they needed to fly mission after mission after mission. He’d always stayed away from those. Coffee and his own drive kept him going. But if coffee and his own drive flagged…

He shrugged. It was something to think about, anyway. He didn’t have to make up his mind once and for all right this minute. If he ever decided he needed those pills, he could get ’em.

Richmond. Capitol Square. A cool, gray, fall day, with the smell of burning leaves in the air-along with other, less pleasant, smells of burning and death. Clarence Potter sat on a bench in the bomb-cratered square and looked at the enormous pyramids of sandbags surrounding the great statues of George Washington and Albert Sidney Johnston. The Egyptians wouldn’t have been ashamed of pyramids like those. So far, they’d done their job. Despite all the damnyankee bombing raids, both statues remained more or less intact.

The Confederate Capitol couldn’t be sandbagged. It looked more like a ruin from the days of Greece and Rome than a place where important things happened. And important things didn’t happen there anymore. Congress met somewhere else these days-exactly where was classified. Potter wasn’t sure why. What difference did it make? Even if the USA blew Congress clean off the map, what difference would it make? Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party ran the CSA these days; Congress was a rubber stamp and a sounding board, and that was about it.

Potter lit a cigarette, adding more smoke to the air that had already made him cough twice. He looked at his watch. The man he was supposed to meet here was late, and he shouldn’t have been. Had something gone wrong?

But when he looked up, Nathan Bedford Forrest III was picking his way across the battered ground. Forrest already had a cigarette going, the coal furiously red. He sat down next to Potter and smoked in angry silence for a minute or so. Then he said, “I do thank you kindly for coming.”

“I should get out and about more often,” Potter answered. “Keeps me fresh. What’s on your mind?”

Instead of answering right away, Forrest lit another cigarette. He smoked it halfway down, blowing out an almost continuous stream of smoke. At last, he asked, “Do you… think Jake Featherston’s got all his oars in the water?”

Whatever Potter had expected, that wasn’t it. He looked around again to make sure nobody was paying extra attention to a couple of officers sitting on a park bench. Seeing nothing and no one out of the ordinary, he said, “Well, I haven’t always been in love with the man”-which was a bigger understatement than Nathan Bedford Forrest III might realize-“but I never thought he was ready for the straitjacket, either. How come you do?”

Forrest hesitated again. Potter had no trouble figuring out why-if he went telling tales to the President, the chief of the General Staff was a dead man. But Forrest must have known that before he asked to meet with Potter. The Intelligence officer gestured impatiently, as if to say, Piss or get off the pot. Unhappily, Forrest said, “Well, things aren’t going as well as we wish they were in Pittsburgh.”

“That makes me unhappy, but it doesn’t make Jake Featherston a candidate for the booby hatch.” Potter’s voice was desert-dry.

“No, of course not.” Nathan Bedford Forrest III looked down at the ground between his feet. He bent and picked up something: a little chunk of shrapnel from a bomb casing. With a grimace, he tossed it away. “But a few days ago I went and asked him if maybe we wouldn’t do better just wrecking Pittsburgh than throwing away more men and materiel than we can afford.”

“And?” Potter asked. “There’s always an ‘and’ to a story like that.”

“Oh, there is,” Forrest said. “And he damn near threw me out of his office-damn near threw me through the door, matter of fact. We’re going to take Pittsburgh, take it away from the damnyankees, come hell or high water, no matter how many soldiers or barrels or airplanes we lose. He… just wouldn’t listen to me. It was like he couldn’t listen to me. His mind was made up, and nothing anybody could say would change it.”

“And so?” Potter said. “The President’s never been what you’d call good at listening to other people or changing his mind. I don’t suppose he’d be President if he were, because he would have quit trying a long time ago.” Not liking Jake Featherston didn’t mean you could ignore his furious, driving, almost demonic energy.

“This wasn’t like a stubborn man talking,” Forrest said-stubbornly. “This was like-like a crazy man talking.” He looked relieved at finally getting that out. “By God, Potter, it really was.”

“All right. Let’s say it was.” Potter knew he sounded as if he might be humoring a lunatic himself. “If it was, what do you propose to do about it? Bear in mind that we’re in the middle of a small disagreement with our neighbors right now.” His wave encompassed the sandbagged statues, the cratered square, the ruins of the Confederate Capitol.

Nathan Bedford Forrest III’s eyes followed his hand. Forrest grimaced again, as if he hadn’t noticed how things were till then. Maybe he hadn’t-maybe he hadn’t let himself. “Jesus Christ, if we followed a nut into this war-”

“You didn’t reckon he was a nut as long as things went our way,” Potter said brutally. Forrest flinched. Potter went on, “Do you really think this is the time to start plotting a coup d’etat? That’s what it would have to be, you know. You’d have to take him down. He’d never leave or change on his own.”

“I do understand that,” Forrest said. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. You were a red-hot Whig even after it wasn’t safe to be a Whig anymore.” He did know a fair bit about Potter’s past, then. “If anybody could see the need for putting our house in order, I reckoned you’d be the man. For God’s sake, Potter, we can’t afford to lose another war. It would ruin us for good.”

“This one’s a long way from lost. We may get Pittsburgh yet.” Part of Potter wanted to leap at any chance to cast down Jake Featherston. That made him even more careful about what he said than he would have been otherwise. He didn’t think Forrest was trying to entrap him-the other officer sounded too upset for that-but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure. When three men plot, one is a fool and two are government spies. What about two men?

I’m already a spy, Potter thought. He laughed inside, though he held his face straight. But he was a spy for the Confederate States. He wasn’t a spy for Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party, and he was damned if he’d turn into one. And if he did ever turn into such a debased creature, he doubtless would be damned.

“So we may.” Forrest spoke cautiously, too. “But how likely do you think that is, what with the way things look now?”

“I don’t know,” Potter said: the exact and literal truth. He thought about Henderson FitzBelmont over at Washington University. He thought about 235 and 238, and the trouble FitzBelmont and his fellow physicists were having in separating the one from the other. He had no idea whether Forrest knew about FitzBelmont’s project. He couldn’t ask, either, for fear the chief of the General Staff didn’t.

If the physicists could build their bomb, the CSA would win the war. Drop one of those on Pittsburgh, and it wouldn’t cause problems anymore. Drop one on Philadelphia, one on New York City, one on Boston, one on Pontiac… That would knock the United States flat and kick them in the teeth while they were down.

Then Potter thought about the U.S. project in Washington State. He thought about bombs blowing Richmond and Atlanta and Louisville and Birmingham and New Orleans and Dallas off the map. It was a race, a race into the unknown. Whoever first played Prometheus and stole fire from the gods would drop that fire on his enemies’ heads.

He tried to imagine fighting a war where both sides had bombs like that. His mind recoiled like a horse shying at a snake. That wouldn’t be submachine guns at two paces. It would be flamethrowers at two paces.

And what sort of weapons would you use in the war after that one? To his surprise, the answer formed almost as soon as the question did.

You would fight that next war with rocks.

“We’re on the tiger’s back right now, and we’ve got hold of his ears,” he said, not knowing and not much caring whether he was talking about Featherston or about the war. “If you tell me that’s not where we want to be, I won’t argue with you. But if you say we’d do better letting go and jumping off, I have to say I think you’re out of your mind-sir. Do you want Don Partridge trying to run things?” He supposed he’d been talking about Jake after all.

Nathan Bedford Forrest III hissed like a wounded snake himself. “Damn you, Potter, you don’t fight fair.”

“I didn’t know that was part of the requirement,” Potter said. “I thought the only thing you had to do was win.”

“That’s it,” Forrest agreed. “And that’s what I wanted to ask you. Do you think we can win the war with Jake Featherston in charge of things?”

“Do you think we can win without him?” Potter asked in return. “Do you think we can even get out of the war without him?” He didn’t ask about getting out of the war with Featherston still in the Gray House. That wouldn’t happen. Period. Exclamation point, even.

Forrest sat on the bench with a faraway look in his eyes. Potter suspected his own face bore a similar expression. How would the Confederate States do if they had to fight on without that pillar of fire at their heart? No, he didn’t love Featherston-far from it. He did, reluctantly, respect him.

Slowly, the chief of the General Staff got to his feet. “Maybe we’ll talk about this another time,” he said. “I hope we don’t, but maybe we will.” He tipped his hat and walked away.

A starling perched in a shattered tree not far from where Potter sat. It chirped metallically. The shimmering summer gloss was off its feathers; it wore a duller autumn plumage. Potter swore under his breath. The gloss was off the war, too. He thought of one question he hadn’t asked himself before. Could the CSA win even with Jake Featherston at the helm?

Potter had thought so when the barrels charged from the Ohio up to Lake Erie. He hadn’t believed he was guilty of the old Confederate error of underestimating how tough the damnyankees were. He hadn’t believed it, but evidently he was, because the United States refused to fold up. Would even the fall of Pittsburgh knock them out of the fight? Again, he just didn’t know.

And did Nathan Bedford Forrest III know what he was talking about? Was the President of the Confederate States of America nuttier than a five-dollar fruitcake? Potter shook his head. That was the wrong question. If Featherston was nuttier than a five-dollar fruitcake, what about it? Being out of your tree didn’t necessarily disqualify you from holding office. Some people said only a crazy man would want to be President of the CSA. Potter wasn’t one of them, but he could see their point.

Was Featherston crazy enough to be unfit to lead during wartime? That was what it came down to. Potter would have loved to believe it. He wouldn’t have been sorry for an excuse to throw Jake Featherston out on his ear-no, to kill him, because he wouldn’t go without a fight, and he’d fight hard. He always did. Forrest said he’d seemed crazy when he refused to pull back from Pittsburgh.

Maybe the chief of the General Staff was right. But Potter wasn’t ready to upset the Confederate applecart on a maybe. Featherston was at least as likely to be crazy like a fox. He’d proved that time and again. Taking Pittsburgh might prove it once more.

“Better to wait,” Potter murmured. Acting was irrevocable, and he didn’t think the time ripe. If going into Pittsburgh proved a fiasco… Well, so what? Did that mean Featherston had gone around the bend, or just that he’d made a mistake?

Did it matter? If Pittsburgh proved a fiasco, the Confederate States were in trouble either way. Somebody would have to take the blame. Who else but Jake Featherston then?

Nodding to himself, Potter got to his feet with one more thing to worry about. If Pittsburgh proved a fiasco, who took the blame might not matter, either.

To say Jefferson Pinkard was not a happy man failed to use the full power of language. Somebody in Richmond got a brainstorm. Who got to make that brainstorm real? Pinkard did. Some damnfool Negro in Jackson blew himself up, and a bunch of white women with him? Yeah, all right, he was a dirty, stinking son of a bitch. But get rid of all the Negroes in Jackson on account of him? At once? That was lunacy. That was also what Jeff had orders to do.

When the telegram came in, he telephoned Ferdinand Koenig and asked, “How many niggers are we talking about here?”

“Hell, I don’t know off the top of my head,” the Attorney General answered, which did not fill Jeff with confidence. Koenig said, “I’ll get back to you this afternoon. You want to know what you’re getting into, do you?”

“You might say so,” Pinkard said tightly. “Yeah, you just might.”

Ferdinand Koenig was as good as his word. Just after Jeff’s lunch, he got another telegram. TWENTY-FIVE OR THIRTY THOUSAND. F.K., it said. What Pinkard said when he saw that had an f and a k in it, too, with a couple of other letters in between. He said several other things right afterwards, most of them even hotter than what he’d started with.

Once his spleen was well and truly vented-once it had blown off about three counties’ worth of steam-he called Vern Green into his office and gave the guard chief the news. “Well, Jesus Christ!” Green said. “We got to get rid o’ these niggers? We don’t just try and stuff ’em on in here?”

“That’s what the orders are,” Jeff said grimly.

“How soon they gonna start coming?” Green asked.

“I don’t exactly know-not exactly,” Pinkard answered. “But it won’t be long-I sure as hell know that. Fast as they can throw ’em on trains and ship ’em out here. A few days-a week, tops.”

“You figuring on using the bathhouses and the trucks?”

Jeff nodded. “Don’t see how we’ve got even a prayer of doing it if we don’t. You get the ’dozer crews out to the other place, too, and have ’em dig lots of new trenches. If we’re doing all of Jackson, that’ll take up some room.” He didn’t talk about mass graves, not in so many words.

The guard chief followed him even so. “I’ll see to it,” he promised. “We’re gonna be busy as shit, ain’t we?”

“No,” Jeff answered. Green looked at him in surprise. He condescended to explain: “We’ll be a hell of a lot busier than that.”

“Oh. Yeah,” Green said. “Wish to God I could tell you you were wrong, but that’s how it’s gonna be, all right.” He scowled. “We’ll have a fuck of a time keeping the rest of the niggers from figuring out what’s goin’ on, too.”

“Uh-huh. That already crossed my mind,” Pinkard said. “Don’t know what we can do about it. We got orders on this-orders right from the top.” Ferdinand Koenig wasn’t the top, of course, but he was only one short step down. And he’d made it real clear the President of the CSA wanted every black from Jackson wiped off the face of the earth. What Jake Featherston wanted, Jake Featherston got.

Green sighed. “Well, we’ll just have to take care of that when it turns into a problem, that’s all. In the meantime… In the meantime, I’ll let the boys know a big pile of shit’s rolling down the hill, and we’re on the bottom.” He got to his feet. “Freedom!”

“Freedom!” Jeff echoed. The guard chief left his office. Jeff pulled his copy of Over Open Sights off the shelf by his desk. He knew just the passage he was looking for: the one where Featherston talked about how killing off a few thousand Negroes before the Great War would have saved a lot of trouble during and after. Jeff nodded to himself. That was true, every word of it. When he read the words, he could hear Jake Featherston’s hot, angry voice.

Even so, after a while he scratched his head and put down the book. This didn’t seem the same as that. People on the outside would know Jackson’s blacks had been sent away to camps, but that was all they would know. Even the Negroes already in the camps weren’t supposed to know they’d never come out alive. So what, exactly, was the point?

But that did have an answer. The point was to get rid of as many spooks as the Freedom Party and the Confederate government could arrange to get rid of. Jeff didn’t see anything wrong with what the Party wanted-just the opposite. But doing it in such a big lump made things work less smoothly than they might have, less smoothly than they should. Camp Determination’s profile was going to look like a boa constrictor that had swallowed a big old pig. You’d be able to see the lump the pig made as it worked its way from one end of the snake to the other.

Both sides of the camp, men’s and women’s, were on edge even before the first trains rolled in out of the east. The Negroes knew something was going on, even if they didn’t know what. They must have got that from the guards. Pinkard thought about reaming Vern Green out about it, but he didn’t. The guards wouldn’t have been human if they didn’t pass on the feeling that something was cooking. They hadn’t said what, for which Jeff was duly grateful.

He went out to watch his crews at work when the first train from Jackson came in. He was proud of them. They had a routine, and they stuck to it as much as they could. They hauled the luckless blacks off the train and separated them, men to the left, women and children off to the right. Then they went through the train and pulled out any Negroes who’d tried to get cute and hide. Then more blacks-men as close to trusties as Camp Determination held-removed the bodies of those who’d died on the way.

There were more of those than usual. The survivors moaned about how they’d been packed like sardines, about how they hadn’t had anything to eat or drink. Most of them moaned about how they hadn’t even been able to pack a carpetbag.

The guards did their best to soothe them. “Don’t y’all worry ’bout a thing,” a troop leader called reassuringly, smooth and confident as a preacher in the pulpit. “We’re gonna ship some of you out to other camps right away, and we’re gonna let the rest of you get cleaned up before we move you. You do what people tell you, and you’ll be just fine.”

“This way!” guards yelled. “This way!” The Negroes obeyed. They were too dazed and battered not to-and the guards had automatic weapons to make sure they didn’t get out of line. Most of them didn’t even try.

One man did ask, “How come we gonna git shipped somewheres else when we only just got here?” Nobody answered him, and he didn’t ask twice.

“Listen up, y’all!” an officer shouted. “You’re gonna be in two groups. One group goes on to a camp by Lubbock, the other one goes down by El Paso.” There were camps in both places, small ones. They were there mainly to keep Negroes from panicking when they heard something like that. The officer went on, “Those of you bound for the Lubbock camp, we’re gonna bathe and delouse y’all right here, on account of we got bigger bathhouses than they do at that camp. Y’all goin’ to El Paso, they’ll take care of that when you get there.”

Pinkard and his top officers had hammered out the story in the time before the trains started coming in. He didn’t like it; it had holes you could throw a dog through. But it gave some kind of explanation, anyway, and the Negroes wouldn’t have much time to wonder and worry.

Guards started going along the lines of Negroes. They would say, “Lubbock,” to some and, “El Paso,” to others. Every so often, they would add, “Remember where you’re supposed to go, or you’ll catch hell!”

When everybody had an assignment, officers yelled, “El Paso, this way!” and, “Lubbock, this way!” Two columns of men and two of women and children formed. “Now get moving!” the officers shouted.

A fat black woman let out a screech: “My husband goin’ to de one place, an’ I is goin’ to de other one!” The baby she held in her arms wailed.

“Can’t do anything about it now,” a troop leader told her. “When you get where you’re goin’, you talk to the people there. They’ll do the paperwork and transfer you.”

She still grumbled, but she seemed happier. Pinkard craned his neck to see who that troop leader was. Hobart Martin, that was his name. He’d won himself a commendation letter, sure as hell. That kind of complaint could have caused real trouble, maybe even a riot. It was something the guards hadn’t thought of, and they should have. Of course separating families made people jump and shout. But Martin had calmed the woman down, and his words kept other men and women from raising a stink. As long as they thought everything would be taken care of…

Pinkard nodded to himself. Everything would be taken care of, all right.

He went with the men who believed they were bound for El Paso. They had to march-or rather, shamble-all the way through the camp to get to the bathhouse that wasn’t. He’d posted guards with automatic rifles on both sides of their route. He didn’t think they would try to break away, but he worried that the present inmates might try to rescue them. A show of force ahead of time was the best thing he could think of to keep that from happening.

“Move along! Move along!” guards shouted. “Don’t hold up the line, or you’re in trouble!” They were already in the worst trouble they could find, but they didn’t know it. This whole charade was to keep them-and the present inmates-from finding out.

Hipolito Rodriguez stood there with a rifle at the ready. Like most men from the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades, Hip liked a submachine gun better because it was lighter and smaller. But Jeff wanted the guards to have weapons with real stopping power today. He nodded to Rodriguez. The Sonoran nodded back. Then he looked away, scanning the inmates for any sign of trouble. He knew how things worked. The more you showed that you were ready for anything, the less likely you were to run into trouble.

Jeff nodded to himself when the last black man passed through the gateway separating the main camp from the bathhouse. Getting the line through the camp was the hardest, most worrisome part. Already, trucks were taking away the first Negroes who thought they were heading for El Paso. Their true journey would be a lot shorter-and a good thing, too, because Jeff would need those trucks again pretty damn quick to handle more blacks.

He nodded again when the door to the bathhouse closed behind the last Negro man in the queue. Wasn’t there some poem that went, All hope abandon, ye who enter here? Once that door closed, those Negroes lost their last hope. They’d get herded into the big room that wasn’t a delousing chamber, and that would be that.

When was the next train coming? Would the camp be able to handle it? Could the crew get the corpses out of the alleged bathhouse, could the trucks get back from the mass grave, fast enough? They could. They did. By the time the next trainload of Negroes from Jackson stopped on the spur between the men’s and women’s camps, the guards were ready.

The next week was the busiest time Jeff remembered. He and his crew ran on sleep snatched in the intervals between trains and on endless cigarettes and cups of coffee. Every storage facility in the camp overflowed, even if relatively few of the Negroes had brought baggage with them. Where those Negroes went, they didn’t need baggage.

And at the end of it, Jefferson Pinkard looked at Vern Green and said, “By God, we reduced that population.”

“Sure as hell did,” the guard chief agreed. Jeff pulled a pint of whiskey out of his desk drawer. He took a snort, then passed the pint to Green. The number two man at Camp Determination also drank. After what they’d just been through, they’d damn well earned the booze.

Black clouds boiled up over Andersonville, Georgia. Where the sky wasn’t black, it was an ugly yellow, the color of a fading bruise. The rising wind blew a lock of Jonathan Moss’ hair into his eyes. He tossed his head. The wind got stronger. A raindrop hit him in the nose.

He looked around the prison-camp grounds. POWs were heading into the barracks as fast as they could. That looked like a hell of a good idea. The wind tugged at his clothes as he hurried toward shelter.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” one of the other prisoners said when he walked in. “Moss does have the sense to come in out of the rain.”

POWs laughed. Hell, Moss laughed himself. In Andersonville, fun was where you found it, and you didn’t have a lot of places to look. But Captain Nick Cantarella, who’d come in just ahead of Moss, said, “Noah would find someplace to hide from this. It looks like a bastard and a half out there.”

“Worse than that storm this summer?” somebody said.

“I think maybe,” Cantarella answered, and Moss found himself nodding. That had been a cloudburst to end all cloudbursts, yeah. It had also been a cloudburst to end all escape plans, at least for the time being. But whatever was building out there now looked downright vicious. The light was weird, almost flickering; it might have come from the trick-photography department of a bad horror film.

Somebody sitting close by a window said, “Son of a bitch!” Several people asked him what was going on. He pointed. “The guards are coming down from their towers and running like hell!”

“Jesus!” Moss said, which was one of the milder comments in the barracks. The gray-uniformed guards never left the towers unmanned. Never. They always wanted to be able to rake the camp with machine-gun fire. If they were bailing out now…

“Oh, fuck!” said the man by the window. Then he said something even worse: “Tornado!”

Somebody with a flat Indiana accent said, “Open the doors, quick! It’ll try and suck all the air out of any building it comes close to. If the air can’t get out, the buildings’ll blow up.” Moss, who’d shut the door behind him, quickly opened it again. The Midwesterner sounded like a man who knew what he was talking about.

POWs crowded toward windows to watch the twister. Moss didn’t. He didn’t want to be anywhere near glass that was liable to splinter and fly as if a bomb went off close by. “Godalmightydamn, will you look at that motherfucker!” somebody said, more reverently than otherwise.

“Wish to hell we had a storm cellar,” somebody else put in. That made good sense. Moss wished for one, too. What they had were barracks built as flimsily as the Geneva Convention allowed, or maybe a little cheaper than that. If the tornado plowed into them, it wouldn’t even notice. Everybody unlucky enough to be inside sure would, though.

He could hear it now, and feel it, too. It sounded like the world’s biggest freight train heading straight for him. That wasn’t really fair to the tornado. If it ran into a train, it would scatter railroad cars like jackstraws. “The Lord is my shepherd-” somebody began.

The Twenty-third Psalm seemed right. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” might have fit even better, because the Lord was doing some serious trampling out there. Wind tugged at Moss, trying to pull him out the open door. The officer who’d suggested opening it knew what was what. That air would have escaped anyway. With the doors open, it could get out without forcing itself out.

Moss stepped away from the door. The flow wasn’t strong enough to keep him from doing that. He looked over his shoulder and got a glimpse of the onrushing funnel cloud. That made him do a little praying of his own. He’d known one or two tornadoes when he lived near Chicago, but only one or two. They visited downstate Illinois more often.

And they visited the CSA.

“Looks like it’s not gonna hit us,” somebody said-shouted, actually, because that was the only way anyone could make himself heard through the roar and scream of the wind.

Maybe the man who’d yelled was a bombardier. Whoever he was, he seemed able to gauge what that horrid funnel would do. Instead of blowing the barracks to hell and gone, it walked along a couple of hundred yards away. A few windows blew out, but that was all the damage they took. The twister snarled away toward the east.

“Lord!” a POW said, which summed things up pretty damn well.

Nick Cantarella looked outside. He said, “My God,” too, but in an altogether different tone of voice. The captain from New York City pointed. “That fucker just blew half the wire around the camp all the way to the moon.”

Prisoners rushed to the windows, those that still had glass and those that didn’t. Cantarella wasn’t wrong. The tornado cared no more about barbed wire and guard towers than it did about anything else in its path. Three men had the same thought at the same time: “Let’s get out of here!”

That sounded good to Jonathan Moss. He even had some brown Confederate bills-no, they called them banknotes down here-in his pocket. The CSA played by the rules of war, and paid captive officers at the same rate as their own men of equivalent grade. Why not? In camp, the notes were only paper, good for poker games but not much else.

“If they catch you, they can punish you,” Colonel Summers warned. The senior U.S. officer went on, “We’re a long way from the border. Odds of making it back to the USA aren’t good. You might be smarter just sitting this one out.”

Summers had to say something like that. Moss understood as much. Someone needed to be careful and responsible and adult. Captain Cantarella put the other side of things in perspective: “Anybody who’s gonna go better get his ass in gear right now. Those Confederate bastards won’t waste a hell of a lot of time hunkered down wherever they’re at. They’ll come out, and they’ll have guns.”

That made up Moss’ mind for him. He wasn’t the first one out the door, but he was only a couple of steps behind the guy who was. Cantarella was hard on his heels. “How did the escape committee sign up a tornado?” Moss asked him.

Cantarella’s grin was swarthy and stubbly and full of exhilaration. “Hey, Mother Nature owed us one after the way that thunderstorm fucked us over. Every once in a while, I think maybe there’s a God.”

Moss had thought so, too, till that Canuck’s bomb robbed him of Laura and Dorothy. Believing in anything but revenge came hard after that. He said, “You want to stick together? Two heads may be better than one.”

“Long as we can, anyway,” Cantarella answered. “We may have to split up somewhere down the line, but I’m with you till then.” He stuck out his hand. Moss shook it.

Out past the wire they went, out past the wreckage of the guard towers. A machine gun stuck up from a clump of bushes. “Wish it was a rifle,” Moss said. “Piece like that, though, it’s too heavy to lug.”

“Yeah,” Cantarella said. “What we gotta do now is, we gotta make tracks. Somethin’ tells me we don’t have a whole lotta time.” His clotted accent was about as far from a C.S. drawl as it could be.

The something that told him was no doubt common sense. “You think we have a better chance heading north, or east toward the ocean?” Moss asked.

“Depends,” the other U.S. officer said. “If you figure our Navy’s got boats or ships or whatever the hell out in the Atlantic, we haul ass that way. God knows it’s closer. But if we gotta sail up the coast, fuhgeddaboutit, unless you’re a hell of a lot better sailor than I am.”

“John Paul Jones I’m not,” Moss answered, and Cantarella laughed. What the Italian said made an unfortunate amount of sense. Moss faced the general direction of Atlanta. “North, then.”

“Right. Maybe we can steal some clothes so we look like a coupla ordinary Confederate assholes, buy train tickets, and get up to Richmond or somewheres in style,” Cantarella said.

They carried no papers. They wore elderly U.S. uniforms (Cantarella did remember that). They had the wrong accent. They probably didn’t have enough money for train tickets. But for those minor details, it struck Moss as a terrific plan. He didn’t criticize, not out loud. He liked the idea of hoofing it across Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia no better than Cantarella did.

They hadn’t got very far into the pine woods north of Andersonville before gunshots rang out behind them. “Ahhh, shit,” Cantarella said, which summed up Moss’ feelings, too. The guards had noticed prisoners escaping, then.

Without Nick Cantarella, Moss figured he would have been recaptured in short order. The younger man was an infantry officer, and actually knew what he was doing as he clumped along on the ground. He and Moss splashed along creeks to throw hounds off the scent. “Didn’t they do this in Uncle Tom’s Cabin?” Moss said.

“Beats me,” Cantarella answered. “All I know is, this shit works.”

Maybe it did. Moss heard several more bursts of gunfire, but he didn’t see any C.S. prison guards or soldiers. He did get tired. His feet got sore. He knew he was slowing Cantarella down. “If you want to go on without me, it’s all right,” he said.

“Nah.” Cantarella shook his head. “Like you said, two heads are better than one. ’Sides, you can come closer to talking like these assholes than I can.”

“I wonder,” Moss said. Midwest overlain by Canadian didn’t sound much more Confederate than strong New York City. He figured he’d worry about that when he had to, not before. He had other things to worry about now: not only his feet but also the growing emptiness in his belly. If this were a planned escape, he would have brought food along. Now, he and Cantarella would be raiding henhouses before long. That would leave a trail a blind idiot, or even a Confederate guard, could follow.

They came out of the woods into cotton country. Moss had always pictured swarms of darkies in the fields with hoes. It wasn’t like that. Except for a cultivator chugging along in the distance, the countryside was eerily empty. Cantarella had the same thought. “Where’d all the smokes go?” he said.

“Beats me.” Moss had trouble believing the atrocity stories he’d heard. Seeing that landscape without people, though, he had less trouble than before.

He and Nick went on up a poorly paved road till nightfall. Then they lay down by the roadside. All they had to cover themselves with were cotton plants. That would help give them away, too. But it got chilly after the sun went down. The plants weren’t good blankets, but they were better than nothing. Moss wasn’t sure he could fall asleep on bare ground. Five minutes later, he was snoring.

Morning twilight turned the eastern sky gray when he woke. But the growing light wasn’t what roused him. Those voices weren’t just part of his dreams. He saw three men silhouetted against the sky. They all carried rifles.

He nudged Nick, who’d stayed asleep. “Wake up!” he hissed. “We’re caught!”

One of the armed men came up to them. In a low voice, he asked, “You some o’ the Yankees what got outa Andersonville?”

“That’s right.” Suddenly hope flared in Moss. “Are you… fighting against the Confederate government?”

“Bet your ass, ofay,” the rifle-toting Negro answered. “How you like to he’p us?”

Moss looked toward Nick Cantarella. Cantarella was looking back at him. Moss didn’t think it was the sort of invitation they could refuse, not if they wanted to keep breathing. He got to his feet, ignoring creaks and crunches. “I think we just joined the underground,” he said. Nick Cantarella nodded.

Scipio didn’t think he’d ever heard “Auld Lang Syne” sung when it wasn’t New Year’s Eve. He didn’t think he’d ever heard it sung in such a variety of accents, either-none of them the least bit Scots.

Jerry Dover grinned at the cooks and waiters and busboys and dishwashers he’d bossed for so long. “I’d like to tell y’all one thing,” he said. They waited expectantly. His grin got wider. “Fuck you, you sons of bitches!”

They laughed like loons. Scipio laughed as loud as anybody, but his mirth had a bitter edge. With Jerry Dover gone, all the Negroes who worked for the Huntsman’s Lodge were liable to get fucked. Who could say what the new manager would be like? Would he take care of his people the way Dover had? Scipio supposed it wasn’t impossible. He also knew only too well it wasn’t likely.

“You go kill them damnyankees, Mistuh Dover! Shoot ’em down like the yellow dogs they is!” a cook shouted. He swigged from a bottle of champagne. Jerry Dover’s sendoff was going to put a dent in the restaurant’s liquor stock.

“If I have to pick up a gun, this country’s in deeper shit than anybody ever figured,” Dover said, and got another laugh. “It’s the Quartermaster Corps for me.”

That actually made good sense. The Confederate Army was doing it anyway. Jerry Dover knew everything there was to know about feeding people. Feeding them in the Army was different from doing it in a restaurant, but not all that different. He’d help the CSA more doing that than he would in the infantry, and somebody must have realized as much.

Scipio had an almost-empty glass in his hand. A moment later, as if by magic, it wasn’t empty anymore. He sipped. He had had bourbon in there. This was Scotch. He’d feel like hell in the morning. Right now, morning felt a million miles away.

“T’ank you, Senor Dover. You give us work.” That was Jose, one of the dishwashers from the Empire of Mexico. He’d taken a job from a black man. Scipio wanted to hate him because of that-wanted to and found he couldn’t. Jose was only trying to make a living for himself, and he worked like a man with a gun to his head. How could you hate somebody like that?

“For he’s a jolly good fellow!” The staff at the Huntsman’s Lodge started singing again, louder and more raucously than ever. In some ways, blacks and whites in the CSA understood one another and got along with one another pretty well… or they would have, if the Freedom Party hadn’t got in the way.

Jerry Dover hoisted his own glass. He’d been drinking as hard as his help. “You bastards are good,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t reckon y’all know how good you are. I’m gonna have to whip some new folks into shape, and I don’t figure they’ll be a patch on you.”

“Take us with you!” somebody behind Scipio shouted. In an instant, everyone was yelling it: “Take us with you! Take us with you!”

“Hell, I would if I could,” Dover said. “I don’t think that’ll happen, though.”

The clamor went on all the same. Scipio understood why: if these black men were busy cooking for soldiers and serving them, they’d be less likely to go to a camp. Anything-anything at all-seemed better than going to a camp.

“I don’t want anybody to get in trouble for being out too late,” Dover said after a while. The response to that was angry and profane. This was a night of license, and would have been even if not fueled by booze. Whatever the restaurant staff did short of burning the place down, he would let them get away with it.

Aurelius tapped Scipio on the arm. “How you like bein’ an old man at a young men’s fling?” the other veteran waiter asked.

“Long as I’s here,” Scipio answered. “Long as I’s anywhere.”

“Amen,” Aurelius said.

Scipio beckoned him off to one side. Once the two old men had put a little distance between themselves and the rest of the staff, Scipio said, “Tell you what I was afeared of. I was afeared of a people bomb. I done been through two auto bombs. Don’t reckon I’d las’ if somethin’ else blow up around me.”

“Auto bombs is nasty business,” Aurelius said. “People bombs… People bombs is worse.” He shuddered. “How you walk in somewhere, knowin’ you got ’splosives strapped on you? All you got to do is click the switch or whatever the hell-and then you is splattered all over the walls.”

“Way things is nowadays, lotta niggers reckon they gots nothin’ to lose,” Scipio said.

Aurelius nodded. “I know that. I don’t like it. If it ain’t a judgment on the Confederate States of America, I dunno what would be. But still, no matter how bad things is, is they ever bad enough to blow your ownself up?”

“Dat nigger in Jackson done thought so,” Scipio said. “Damn nigger was a waiter, too. My tips ain’t been the same since he done it.”

“Your tips ain’t all that’s hurtin’,” Aurelius reminded him. “They put all the niggers in Jackson on trains an’ ship ’em off to camps. All of ’em, jus’ like that.” He snapped his fingers. “An’ the Freedom Party don’t try to hide it or nothin’. Hell, the Freedom Party braggin’ to beat the band.”

“Not too long after de Great War end, I’s in de park takin’ de air, an’ who should come make a speech but Jake Featherston?” Scipio shuddered at the memory, even if it was almost a quarter of a century old. “Everybody reckon he nothin’ but a crazy man. I reckon de same thing back then. But he scare de piss outa me even so.”

Aurelius looked around to see if anyone was listening to them. Once he was satisfied, he said, “That Featherston, he ain’t nothin’ but a crazy man.”

“No.” Regretfully, Scipio shook his head. “He a crazy man, sho’, but he ain’t nothin’ but a crazy man. You hear what I’s sayin’? Nobody who’s nothin’ but a crazy man kin do as much harm as Jake Featherston.”

Aurelius considered that. He also considered his glass, which was empty. When he too shook his head, Scipio wasn’t sure whether he mourned the empty glass or the Freedom Party’s devastation. Then he said, “Well, you is right, an’ I wish you wasn’t.” He could do something about getting more whiskey. Nobody on the North American continent had had much luck doing anything about Jake Featherston.

Scipio and Aurelius reeled back to the Terry together. No explosions marred the night. No automobiles going up in fireballs threw jagged metal and blazing gasoline in all directions. No desperate Negroes threw nails and chunks of themselves every which way. Except for a whip-poor-will’s mournful call, everything was peaceful and quiet.

“You damn coons are late,” grumbled the cop who opened the gate for them. “Even for y’all, you’re late.”

“Sorry, suh,” Scipio slurred. “We was sayin’ good-bye to our boss. He goin’ into de Army.”

The cop’s left hand had only the thumb and index finger. You didn’t notice straight off, probably because he kept that hand in his pocket whenever he could. “Good luck to him,” he said. “You spooks don’t know when you’re well off. You don’t got to worry about shit like that.”

Was he right? Scipio didn’t think so. If Negroes had the same privileges and rights as whites, wouldn’t they be glad to pick up rifles to help defend the Confederacy? It looked that way to him. But if they had all those privileges and rights, the Confederacy they were defending would be a very different place. Just for openers, it would be a place where Jake Featherston could never get elected, and neither could anyone like him.

Well, it wasn’t like that, and it never would be. The thump of the gate behind Scipio and Aurelius proved as much, and proved it all too well.

He did have a headache when he got up. Cassius scowled at him. “How can you have a good time sayin’ so long to a damn ofay?” his son demanded.

With a sigh, Scipio answered, “It ain’t as simple as you think it is.”

“Oh, yeah,” Cassius said scornfully-he’d got to the point where he would quarrel with anything Scipio said just because Scipio said it. “How come?”

“On account of I be dead if Jerry Dover don’t want me alive an’ workin’ there,” Scipio said. “On account of you an’ your sister an’ your mama go to a camp-or else you jus’ end up dead, too.”

“Jerry Dover still a damn ofay,” Cassius said.

“Fine.” Scipio didn’t feel like arguing with him, especially not with a head pounding like a drop forge. He took a couple of aspirins. They made his stomach sour, but after a while his headache receded.

He hated walking through the cleaned-out parts of the Terry on his way to work that afternoon. Lawns grew tall and untended and full of weeds. Lots of houses had broken windows. Quite a few had doors standing open. A skinny dog trotted out of one of them and gave Scipio a hard stare. If it were a little bigger, it might have gone for him. Stray dogs scrounged whatever they could. So did stray people. The cleanouts hadn’t missed many. If not for Jerry Dover, they wouldn’t have missed Scipio and his family.

And now Dover was in the Army. Scipio shook his head, dreading what would come next. He’d got to the age where he feared any kind of change. It was too likely to be change for the worse.

A white man waited just inside the kitchen entrance to the Huntsman’s Lodge. “Are you Xerxes or Aurelius?” he asked.

“I is Xerxes, suh,” Scipio answered. The new manager was younger than he’d expected-in his early forties. He had a thin, sharp, clever face and cold blue eyes. Scipio didn’t wonder why he wasn’t in the Army: he sat in a wheelchair, his legs thin and useless inside his trousers.

“My name’s Willard Sloan,” he said, and tapped the arms of the chair with his own arms, which seemed fine. A moment later, he explained why: “Stopped a damnyankee bullet with my back in 1917. I used to be a hell of a football player, you know? So much for that.” His mouth twisted. Then he went on, “Jerry Dover says you’ve been here since dirt. If I need to know anything special, I’m supposed to ask you.”

“I tells you anything I knows, suh.” Scipio meant it. He didn’t expect the white man to like him. It might end up happening, but he didn’t expect it. If Sloan found him useful, that would do almost as well.

“All right. If I have to pick your brains, I’ll holler. For now, you just go on about your business the way you always have. I’ll keep an eye on things, cipher out how they are, before I decide what works good and what needs tinkering.”

“Fair enough, suh. Dis place been de bes’ in town a long time. Sure enough want to keep it dat way,” Scipio said. He and the rest of the staff would be judging Willard Sloan as he judged them. The only trouble was, his judgment carried more weight than theirs.

He did start well. When the cooks were unhappy with some of the beef they got, he used the telephone like a deadly weapon. “You bastard, you reckon you can screw me over on account of I ain’t Dover?” he screamed at the butcher. “You reckon I don’t know Chet Byers? You reckon I won’t do business with him from here on out if you ever pull this shit on me again? Make it right in fifteen minutes, or I blacken your name all over town.” New beef-of the proper quality-got there in twelve minutes flat. Jerry Dover couldn’t have done better, and there was no higher praise than that.