Drive to the East

I

Every antiaircraft gun in Richmond seemed to thunder at once. The sky above the capital of the Confederate States filled with black puffs of smoke. Jake Featherston, the President of the CSA, had heard that his aviators called those bursts nigger-baby flak. They did look something like black dolls-and they were as dangerous as blacks in the Confederacy, too.

U.S. airplanes didn’t usually come over Richmond by daylight, any more than Confederate aircraft usually raided Washington or Philadelphia or New York City when the sun was in the sky. Antiaircraft fire and aggressive fighter patrols had quickly made daylight bombing more expensive than it was worth. The night was the time when bombers droned overhead.

Today, the United States was making an exception. That they were, surprised Jake very little. Two nights before, Confederate bombers had killed U.S. President Al Smith. They hadn’t done it on purpose. Trying to hit one particular man or one particular building in a city like Philadelphia, especially at night, was like going after a needle in a haystack with your eyes closed. Try or not, though, they’d flattened Powel House, the President of the USA’s Philadelphia residence, and smashed the bomb shelter beneath it. Vice President La Follette was Vice President no more.

Featherston wasn’t sure he would have deliberately killed Al Smith if he’d had the chance. After all, he’d hornswoggled a plebiscite on Kentucky and the part of west Texas the USA had called Houston and Sequoyah out of Smith, and triumphantly welcomed the first two back into the Confederacy. But he’d expected Smith to go right on yielding to him, and the son of a bitch hadn’t done it. Smith hadn’t taken the peace proposal Featherston offered him after Confederate armor sliced through Ohio to Lake Erie, either. Even though the USA remained cut in two, the country also remained very much in the war. The struggle wasn’t as sharp and short and easy as Jake had hoped.

So maybe Al Smith was better off dead. Maybe. How could you tell? Like any Vice President, Charlie La Follette was the very definition of an unknown quantity.

But it was only natural for the United States to try to take revenge. Kill our President, will you? We’ll kill yours!

U.S. Wright-27 fighters, no doubt diverted from shooting up Confederate positions near the Rappahannock, escorted the bombers and danced a dance of death with C.S. Hound Dogs. Level bombers, two- and four-engined, rained explosives down on Richmond.

With them, though, came a squadron of dive bombers, airplanes not usually seen in attacks on cities. To Jake’s admittedly biased way of thinking, the CSA had the best dive bomber in the world in the Mule, otherwise known on both sides of the front as the Asskicker. But its U.S. counterparts were also up to the job they had to do.

That job, here, was to pound the crap out of the Confederate Presidential residence up on Shockoe Hill. The building was often called the Gray House, after the U.S. White House. If the flak over Richmond as a whole was heavy, that over the Gray House was heavier still. Half a dozen guns stood on the Gray House grounds alone. If an airplane was hit, it seemed as if a pilot could walk on shell bursts all the way to the ground. He couldn’t, of course, but it seemed that way.

A dive bomber took a direct hit and exploded in midair, adding a huge smear of flame and smoke to the already crowded sky. Another, trailing fire from the engine cowling back toward the cockpit, smashed into the ground a few blocks away from the mansion. A greasy pillar of thick black smoke marked the pilot’s pyre.

Another bomber was hit, and another. The rest bored in on their target. Back before the Great War started in 1914, lots of Confederates believed the Yankees were not only enemies but cowardly enemies. They’d learned better, to their cost. The pilots in these U.S. machines were as brave and as skilled as the men the CSA put in the air.

Yet another dive bomber blew up, this one only a few hundred feet above the Gray House. Flaming wreckage fell all around, and even on, the Presidential residence. The survivors did what they were supposed to do. One after another, they released their bombs, pulled out of their dives, and scurried back towards U.S.-held territory as fast as they could go.

No antiaircraft defenses could block that kind of attack. The Gray House flew to pieces like an anthill kicked by a giant’s boot. Some of the wreckage flew up, not out. The damnyankees must have loaded armor-piercing bombs into some of their bombers. If Jake Featherston took refuge in the shelter under the museum, they aimed to blow him to hell and gone anyway.

But Jake wasn’t in the Gray House or in the shelter under it.

Jake wasn’t within a mile of the Gray House, in fact. As soon as he heard Al Smith was dead, Jake had ordered the Presidential residence evacuated. He’d done it quietly; making a fuss about it would have tipped off the damnyankees that he wasn’t where they wanted him to be. At the moment, he was holed up in a none too fancy hotel about a mile west of Capitol Square. His bodyguards kept screaming at him to get his ass down to the basement, but he wanted to watch the show. It beat the hell out of Fourth of July fireworks.

Saul Goldman didn’t scream. The C.S. Director of Communications was both more restrained and smarter than that. He said, “Mr. President, please take cover. If a bomb falls on you here, the United States win, just the same as if you’d stayed up on Shockoe Hill. The country needs you. Stay safe.”

Jake eyed the pudgy, gray-haired little Jew with something that was for a moment not far from hatred. He ran the Confederate States, ran them more nearly absolutely than any previous North American ruler had run his country-and that included all the goddamn useless Maximilians in the Empire of Mexico. Nobody could tell him what to do, nobody at all. Saul hadn’t tried, unlike the Freedom Party guards who’d bellowed at him. No, Saul had done far worse than that. He’d talked sense.

“All right, dammit,” Featherston said peevishly, and withdrew. He affected not to hear the sighs of relief from everyone around him.

Sitting down in the basement was as bad as he’d known it would be. He despised doing nothing. He despised having to do nothing. He wanted to be up there hitting back at his enemies, or else hitting them first and hitting them so hard, they couldn’t hit back at him. He’d tried to do that to the United States. The first blow hadn’t quite knocked them out. The next one… He vowed the next one would.

Catching his foul mood, Goldman said, “Don’t worry about it, Mr. President. When you go on the wireless and let the United States know you’re still here, that will hurt them worse than losing a big city.”

Again, the Director of Communications made sense. Jake found himself nodding, whether he wanted to or not. “Well, you’re right,” he said. “They can’t afford to come after me like that all the time. They won’t have any airplanes or pilots left if they do, on account of we’ll blow ’em all to hell and gone.” He pointed to Goldman. “Make sure there’s a studio waiting for me just as soon as these Yankee bastards let up, Saul.”

“I’ll see to it, sir,” Goldman promised.

He was as good as his word, too. He always was. That by itself made him somebody to cherish. Most people did what they could and gave excuses for the rest. Saul Goldman did what he said he’d do. So did Jake himself. People hadn’t believed him. He’d taken more than sixteen years, a lot of them lean and hungry, to get to the top. Now that he’d arrived, he was doing just what he’d told folks he would. Some people had the nerve to act surprised. Hadn’t they been listening, dammit?

An armored limousine took him to a studio. Nothing short of a direct hit by a bomb would make this baby blink. Jake had already survived two assassination attempts, not counting this latest one from the USA. Except when his blood was up, the way it had been during the air raid, he didn’t believe in taking unnecessary chances.

By now, sitting down in front of a microphone was second nature to him. He’d been a jump ahead of the Whigs and Radical Liberals in figuring out what wireless could do for a politician, and he still used it better than anybody else in the CSA or the USA. Having Saul Goldman on his side helped. He knew that. But he had himself on his side, too, and he was his own best advertisement.

In the room next door, the engineer held up one finger-one minute till airtime. Jake waved back at the glass square set into the wall between the rooms to show he’d got the message. He always acknowledged the competence of people like engineers. They did their jobs so he could do his. He took one last look around. There wasn’t much to see. Except for that glass square, the walls and ceiling of the studio were covered in what looked like cardboard egg cartons that helped deaden unwanted noise and echoes.

The engineer pointed to him. The red light above the square of glass came on. He leaned toward the microphone. “I’m Jake Featherston,” he said, “and I’m here to tell you the truth.” His voice was a harsh rasp. It wasn’t the usual broadcaster’s voice, any more than his rawboned, craggy face was conventionally handsome. But it grabbed attention and it held attention, and who could ask for more than that? Nobody, not in the wireless business.

“Truth is, I’m still here,” he went on after his trademark greeting. “The Yankees dropped bombs on the Gray House, but I’m still here. They threw away God only knows how many airplanes, but I’m still here. They wasted God only knows how much money, but I’m still here. They murdered God only knows how many innocent women and children, but I’m still here. They’ve thrown God only knows how many soldiers at Richmond, but I’m still here-and they’re not. They’ve had God only knows how many fine young men, who could’ve gone on and done other things, shot and gassed and blown to pieces, but I’m still here. They’ve had God only knows how many barrels smashed to scrap metal, but I’m still here. They’ve given guns to our niggers and taught ’em to rise up against the white man, but I’m still here. And let them try whatever else they want to try. I’ve taken it all, and I’ll take some more, on account of I’m-still-here.”

The red light went out. Behind the glass, the engineer applauded. Jake grinned at him. He didn’t think he’d ever seen that before. He raised his hands over his head, fingers interlaced, like a victorious prizefighter. The engineer applauded harder.

When Jake came out of the studio, Saul Goldman stood in the hall with eyes shining behind his glasses. “That… that was outstanding, Mr. President,” he said. “Outstanding.”

“Yeah, I thought it went pretty well,” Featherston said. Around most people, he bragged and swaggered. Goldman, by contrast, could make him modest.

“No one in the United States will have any doubts,” Goldman said. “No one in the Confederate States will, either.”

“That’s what it’s all about,” Jake said. “I don’t want anybody to have any doubts about what I’ve got in mind. I aim to make the Confederate States the grandest country on this continent. I aim to do that, and by God I’m going to do that.” Even Saul Goldman, who’d heard it all before, and heard it times uncounted, nodded as if it were fresh and new.

Aship of his own! Sam Carsten had never dreamt of that, not when he joined the Navy in 1909. He’d never dreamt of becoming an officer at all, but he wore a lieutenant’s two broad gold stripes on each sleeve of his jacket. The Josephus Daniels wasn’t a battlewagon or an airplane carrier-nothing of the sort. The U.S. Navy called her a destroyer escort; in the Royal Navy, she would have been a frigate. She could do a little bit of everything: escort convoys of merchantmen and hunt submersibles that menaced them, lay mines if she had to (though she wasn’t specialized for that), bombard a coast (though that was asking for trouble if airplanes were anywhere close by), and shoot torpedoes and her pair of four-inch popguns at enemy ships. She was all his-306 feet, 220 men.

Commander Cressy, the Remembrance’s executive officer, had been surprised when he got her-surprised, but pleased. Sam’s own exec was a lieutenant, junior grade, just over half his age, a redheaded, freckle-faced go-getter named Pat Cooley. Cooley was probably headed for big things-he was almost bound to be if the war and its quick promotions lasted… and if he lived, of course. Carsten knew that he himself, as a mustang, had gone about as far as he could go. He could hope for lieutenant commander. He could, he supposed, dream of commander-as long as he remembered he was dreaming. Considering where he’d started, he had had a hell of a career.

Cooley looked around with a smile on his face. “Feels like spring, doesn’t it, Captain?”

Captain. Sam knew he couldn’t even dream about getting a fourth stripe. But he was, by God, captain of the Josephus Daniels. “Always feels like spring in San Diego,” he answered. “August, November, March-doesn’t make much difference.”

“Yes, sir,” the exec said. “Another three weeks and we’ll have the genuine article.”

“Uh-huh.” Sam nodded. “We’ll think it’s summer by then, I expect, cruising off the coast of Baja California.”

“Got to let the damn greasers know they picked the wrong side-again,” Cooley said.

“Uh-huh,” Sam repeated. The Empire of Mexico and the Confederate States had been bosom buddies ever since the Second Mexican War. There was a certain irony in that, since Mexican royalty came from the same line as the Austro-Hungarian Emperors, and Austria-Hungary lined up with Germany and the USA. But Confederate independence and Confederate friendship with the first Maximilian had kept the USA from invoking the Monroe Doctrine-had effectively shot the Doctrine right between the eyes. The Emperors of Mexico remembered that and forgot who their ancestors had been.

Pat Cooley was the one who took the Josephus Daniels out of San Diego harbor. Sam knew damn near everything there was to know about gunnery and damage control. His shiphandling skills were, at the moment, as near nonexistent as made no difference. He intended to remedy that. He was and always had been a conscientious man, a plugger. He went forward one step at a time, and it wasn’t always a big step, either. But he did go forward, never back.

Three other destroyer escorts and a light cruiser made up the flotilla that would pay a call on Baja California. Sam could have wished they had some air support. Hell, he did wish it. He’d heard that a swarm of light carriers-converted from merchantman hulls-were abuilding. He hoped like anything that was true. True or not, though, the light carriers weren’t in action yet.

He smeared zinc-oxide ointment on his nose, his cheeks, and the backs of his hands. Freckled Pat Cooley didn’t laugh at all. Sam was very blond and very fair. Even this early impression of San Diego spring was plenty to make him burn. He offered Cooley the tinfoil tube.

“No, thank you, sir,” the exec said. “I’ve got my own.” He’d start to bake just about as fast as Carsten did.

The long swells of the Pacific, swells all the way down from the Gulf of Alaska, raised the destroyer escort and then lowered her. She rolled a few degrees in the process. Here and there, a sailor ran for the rail and gave back his breakfast. Sam smiled at that. His hide was weak, but he had a strong stomach.

He took the wheel when they were out on the open sea. Feeling the whole ship not just through the soles of his feet but also through his hands was quite something. He frowned in concentration, the tip of his tongue peeping out, as he kept station, zigzagging with his companions.

“You’re doing fine, sir,” Cooley said encouragingly. “Ask you something?”

“Go ahead.” Sam watched the compass as he changed course.

“Ease it back just a little-you don’t want to overcorrect,” Cooley said, and then, “How bad are things over in the Sandwich Islands?”

“Well, they sure as hell aren’t good.” Sam did ease it back. “With no carriers over there right now, we’re in a bad way.” He remembered swimming from the mortally damaged Remembrance to the destroyer that plucked him from the warm Pacific, remembered watching the airplane carrier on which he’d served so long slide beneath the waves, and remembered the tears streaming down his face when she did.

Cooley frowned. “We’ve got plenty of our own airplanes on the main islands. We should be able to make the Japs sorry if they come poking their noses down there, right?”

“As long as we can keep ’em in fuel and such, sure,” Carsten answered. “But the islands-Oahu, mostly-just sit there, and the Japs’ carriers can go wherever they want. There’s a gap about halfway between here and the islands that we can’t cover very well from the mainland or from Honolulu. If the Japs start smashing up our supply convoys, we’ve got big trouble, because the Sandwich Islands get damn near everything from the West Coast.”

“We ought to have airplanes with longer range,” the exec said.

“Yeah.” Sam couldn’t say the same thing hadn’t occurred to him. It had probably occurred to every Navy man who’d ever thought about the question. “Only trouble is, that’s the one place where we need ’em. The Confederate States are right next door, so the designers concentrated on guns and bomb load instead. Before the war, I don’t think anybody figured we’d lose Midway and give the Japs a base that far east.”

Cooley’s laugh was anything but amused. “Surprise!” He cocked his head to one side and studied Sam. “You think about this stuff, don’t you?”

Commander Cressy had said almost the same thing in almost the same bemused tone of voice. Like Cressy-who was now a captain-Cooley came out of the Naval Academy. Finding a mustang with a working brain seemed to have perplexed both of them. Cooley had to be more careful about how he showed it: Sam outranked him.

Shrugging, Sam said, “If you guess along, you’re less likely to get caught with your skivvies down. Oh, you will some of the time-it comes with the territory-but you’re less likely to. The more you know, the better off you are.”

“Uh-huh,” Cooley said. It wasn’t disagreement. It was more on the order of, Well, you’re not what I thought you were going to be.

The first Mexican town below the border had a name that translated as Aunt Jane. In peacetime, it was a popular liberty port. The handful of Mexican police didn’t give a damn what American sailors did-this side of arson or gunplay, anyhow. If you couldn’t come back to your ship with a hangover and a dose of the clap, you weren’t half trying.

But it wasn’t peacetime now. The Mexicans hadn’t built a proper coast-defense battery to try to protect poor old Aunt Jane’s honor. What point, when overwhelming U.S. firepower from across the border could smash up almost any prepared position? The greasers had brought in a few three-inch pieces to tell the U.S. Navy to keep its distance. Some of them opened up on the flotilla.

Sam called the Josephus Daniels to general quarters. He laughed to himself as the klaxons hooted. This was the first time he hadn’t had to run like hell to take his battle station. Here he was on the bridge, right where he belonged.

The Mexicans’ fire fell at least half a mile short. Columns of water leaped into the air as shells splashed into the Pacific. Sailors seeing their first action exclaimed at how big those columns were. That made Sam want to laugh again. He’d seen the great gouts of water near misses from fourteen-inch shells kicked up. Next to those, these might have been mice pissing beside elephants.

“Let’s return fire, Mr. Cooley,” Sam said.

“Aye aye, sir.” The exec relayed the order to the gun turrets. Both four-inchers-nothing even slightly fancy themselves: not even secondary armament on a capital ship-swung toward the shore. They fired almost together. At the recoil, the Josephus Daniels heeled slightly to starboard. She recovered almost at once. The guns roared again and again.

Shells began bursting around the places where muzzle flashes revealed the Mexican guns. The other members of the flotilla were firing, too. The bigger cannons on the ships could reach the shore, even if the guns on shore couldn’t touch the ships. Through binoculars, Sam could easily tell the difference between bursts from the four-inch guns on the destroyer escorts and the light cruiser’s six-inchers.

Plucky if outranged, the Mexicans defiantly shot back. “I wouldn’t do that,” Cooley said. “It just tells us we haven’t knocked ’em out. Now more’ll come down on their heads.”

“They’re making a point, I suppose.” Sam peered through the binoculars again. “Our gunnery needs work. I’d say that’s true for every ship here. I can’t do anything about the others, but by God I can fix things on this one.”

“Uh, yes, sir.” Cooley looked at him, plainly wondering whether he knew any more about that than he did about conning a ship.

Sam grinned back. “Son, I was handling a five-inch gun on the Dakota about the time you were a gleam in your old man’s eye.”

“Oh.” The exec blushed between his freckles. “All right, sir.” He grinned, too. “Teach me to keep my mouth shut-and I hardly even opened it.”

One of the bursts on shore was conspicuously bigger than the others had been. “There we go!” Sam said. “Some of their ammo just went up. I don’t know whether they’ve got real dumps there or we hit a limber, but we nailed ’em pretty good either way.”

“Blew some gunners to hell and gone either way, too,” Cooley said.

“That’s the point of it,” Carsten agreed. “They won’t care if we rearrange the landscape. After they bury Jose and Pedro-if they can find enough of ’em left to bury-they’ll get the idea that we can hurt them worse than they can hurt us. It’s about people, Pat. It’s always about people.”

“Uh, yes, sir,” Pat Cooley said again. This time, it wasn’t doubt in his eyes as he looked Sam over: it was bemusement again. Sam laughed inside himself. No, the mustang isn’t quite what you figured on, eh, kid?

The light cruiser’s skipper didn’t choose to linger to continue the one-sided gun duel. The flotilla steamed south. Sam hoped the Mexicans didn’t have anything more up their sleeves than what they’d already shown.

For you, the war is over. The Confederate officer who took Major Jonathan Moss prisoner after his fighter got shot down over Virginia had sounded like an actor mouthing a screenwriter’s lines in a bad film about the Great War. The only thing that had kept Moss from telling him so was that the son of a bitch was likely right.

Moss strolled near the barbed-wire perimeter of a prisoner-of-war camp outside the little town of Andersonville, Georgia. He didn’t get too close to the barbed wire. Inside it was a second perimeter, marked only by two-foot-high stakes with long, flimsy bands supported on top of them. The red dirt between the inner and outer perimeters was always rolled smooth so it would show footprints. The goons in the guard towers outside the barbed wire would open up with machine guns without warning if anybody presumed to set foot on that dead ground without permission.

Other officers-fliers and ground pounders both-also walked along the perimeter or through the camp. The only other thing to do was stay in the barracks, an even more depressing alternative. The Confederates had built them as cheaply and flimsily as the Geneva Convention allowed. No doubt U.S. accommodations for C.S. prisoners were every bit as shabby. Moss didn’t care about that; he wasn’t in a U.S. camp. What he did care about was that, when it rained here-which it did all too often-it rained almost as hard inside the barracks as it did outside.

Clouds were rolling in out of the northwest, which probably meant yet another storm was on the way. Moss looked down at his wrist to see what time it was. Then he muttered to himself. He’d been relieved of wristwatch and wallet shortly after his capture.

All things considered, it could have been worse. The food was lousy-grits and boiled greens and what the guards called fatback, a name that fit only too well-but there was enough of it. Meals were the high points of the day. Considering how dreary they were, that said nothing good about the rest of the time.

A captain came up to Moss. Nick Cantarella looked like what he was: a tough Italian kid out of New York City. “How ya doin’?” he asked.

Moss shrugged. “All things considered, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.” He wasn’t above stealing a line from one of the more inspired film comics he’d seen.

Chuckling, Cantarella said, “Yeah, this place makes Philly look good, and that’s sayin’ somethin’.” He looked around. The guard in the closest tower was watching the two of them, but he couldn’t hear a quiet conversation. No prisoners were in earshot, either. “It could happen one of these days.”

“Could it?” Moss said eagerly.

“Could, I said.” Cantarella left it at that, and trudged away with his head down and the collar of his leather jacket turned up.

However much Moss wanted to learn more, he kept quiet. Trying to know too much and learn too fast only made people in the Andersonville camp suspicious. Not all the inmates were prisoners: so Moss had been assured, anyhow. The United States and Confederate States were branches off the same trunk. They’d grown apart, but not that far apart. It wasn’t impossible for a clever Confederate to impersonate a U.S. officer. No one here was trusted with anything important-indeed, with anything at all-till someone known to be reliable vouched for him. Till then, he was presumed to be talking to the guards.

That had made it harder for Moss to gain people’s confidence. His squadron was fairly new in Maryland, and not many people fighting in the East knew him. Finally, another pilot shot down over Virginia proved to have flown with him in Ohio and Indiana, and also proved to be known to a couple of pilots already in the Andersonville camp. Once they’d assured their friends that Joe was legit, Joe could do the same for Moss.

So now he knew there were plans to stage an escape from the camp. That was all he knew about them. Details would come sooner or later. He had no idea whether he’d be on the list of prisoners chosen to disappear. He did think the breakout had a chance. Following Geneva Convention rules, the Confederates paid prisoners who were commissioned officers the same salary as they gave to men of equal grade in their own service. Escapees would have money, then. They spoke the local language, even if their accent was odd. If they could get outside the barbed wire, get a little start…

For you, the war is over. Moss could hope not, anyhow. He didn’t know what the hope was worth. In the meantime… In the meantime, the rain arrived about half an hour later. It drove Moss back into the barracks. The red dirt outside rapidly turned to a substance resembling nothing so much as tomato soup. Inside, rain dripped between the unpainted pine boards of the roof. Some of the leaks were over bunks. Makeshift cloth awnings channeled away the worst of them.

Moss’ mattress and pillow were cheap cotton sacking stuffed with sawdust and wood shavings. Eight wooden slats across the bed frame supported the bedding. The mattress was every bit as comfortable as Moss had thought it would be when he first set eyes on it. He might have had worse nights sleeping on the slats. Then again, he might not have.

A poker game was going on in one corner of the barracks. A poker game was always going on in one corner of the barracks. The prisoners had little on which to spend the brown banknotes-not bills, not down here-the Confederates gave them. They could buy cigarettes at what passed for the camp canteen. They could pay guards a little extra to bring them something besides grits, greens, and fatback. Past that… Past that, they could play poker and redistribute the wealth.

Every once in a while, Moss sat in, but only every once in a while. The gods might have designed poker as a way to separate him from his money. In a poker game, you were either a shark or you were bait. In the courtroom, he’d been a shark. In the air, he’d been a shark-till a Confederate took a bite out of his fighter. At the poker table, he was bait.

Other captured officers came in out of the rain. Some of them sat down on their bunks. Some of them lay down. Two or three went to sleep. Some men seemed to go into hibernation here, sleeping fourteen or sixteen or eighteen hours a day. Geneva Convention rules said officers didn’t have to work. The sleepy ones took not working to an extreme. Moss didn’t know whether to envy them or to give them a good swift kick in the ass to get their motors started.

As it happened, he didn’t have to boot them today. Confederate guards took care of that. They burst into the barracks, submachine guns at the ready. “Everybody up!” they shouted. “Out of the sack, you lazy fuckers!” Even the yelling didn’t roust one POW. He could have slept through the Trump of Doom, but not through getting thrown out of bed onto the floor.

“What the hell?” he said plaintively, picking himself up.

No one paid any attention to him. The guards didn’t pay attention to any of the prisoners once they were out of the bunks. They paid attention to the bunks themselves, and to the number of slats that held each one up. They were not top-quality human material, to put it mildly-if they had been, they would have been up at the front. Some of them seemed to have trouble counting to eight. Good thing there aren’t eleven slats, Moss thought. They’d have to take off their shoes.

“How come this here one’s only got seven?” one of them demanded.

“Because one of ’em damn well broke, because you damn well used cheap-shit wood when you made it,” answered the lieutenant whose bunk that was. His accent was identical to Cantarella’s, though he looked Irish rather than Italian. He also had the New Yorker’s way of challenging anything he didn’t like.

Moss didn’t give the guards a hard time. It struck him as cruising for a bruising. He’d seen the guards rough people up. That violated the Geneva Convention, but you couldn’t call them on it. They would say the roughee had it coming, and the camp commandant would back them right down the line.

Here, though, the guards didn’t push things. They grumbled and they fumed and then tramped out of the barracks. “What the hell was that all about?” asked a captain who’d been in Andersonville only a few days.

“Beats me,” somebody else answered-an officer who’d been a prisoner longer than Moss had.

It beat Moss, too. When he got the chance to ask Nick Cantarella, he did. Cantarella started laughing. “I’ll bite. What’s funny?” Moss asked.

“The Confederates know what they’re doing, that’s all,” Cantarella answered. He was still laughing, and didn’t care who heard him. He thought it was funny as hell. “If we’re digging a tunnel, those slats are about the best thing we could use to shore it up.”

“Oh.” A light dawned. “And if they’re not missing, then we’re not digging a tunnel?”

“I didn’t say that.” Cantarella was nothing if not coy. “You said that. With a little luck, the guards think that.”

“Then we are digging a tunnel?” Moss persisted.

“I didn’t say that, either. I didn’t say anything. It’s the waddayacallit-the Fifth Amendment, that’s it.”

Moss hadn’t had much to do with the Fifth Amendment while practicing law in occupied Ontario; it hadn’t crossed the border with the U.S. Army. It wasn’t as strong as it might have been in the USA, either. From the 1880s until the Great War, the United States had geared up for a rematch against the Confederacy. Nothing had got in the way of gearing up-and, thanks to a pliant Supreme Court, that nothing included big chunks of the U.S. Constitution.

When he expressed his detailed opinion of the Fifth Amendment and of the horse it rode in on, he just made Cantarella laugh some more. “Dammit, you know I’m legit now,” Moss groused. “The least you could do is tell me what’s going on.”

“Who says I know?” Cantarella answered. “I just work here.” Had he put a pot full of cold water on Moss’ head, it would have boiled in about thirty seconds. Moss’ face must have told him as much. When he laughed again, it was in some embarrassment. “Don’t ask for what I shouldn’t give you, buddy.”

“Why shouldn’t you?” Moss went on steaming. “Only reason I can see is that you still think I might not be the goods.”

“Then you aren’t looking hard enough.” The New Yorker’s voice took on a hard edge. “I don’t give a shit if you’re as legitimate as Teddy Roosevelt. The more people who know more stuff than they ought to, the better chance Featherston’s fuckers have of tearing it out of them. Have you got that through your goddamn thick head now, or shall I draw you a picture?”

“Oh.” Jonathan Moss’ temperature abruptly lowered. He didn’t like security concerns, but he understood them. “Sorry, Captain. I was out of line there.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Like most people, Cantarella was more inclined to be magnanimous after he’d got his way. “When the time comes-if the time comes-you’ll find out whatever you need to know. Till then, just relax. Let Jake Featherston pay your room and board-and your salary, too.”

“He needs to learn something about the hotel business. You’re not supposed to have to lock up your customers to get ’em to stay,” Moss said. Nick Cantarella thought that was funny as hell. Moss would have, too, if he’d been on the other side of the barbed wire.

For quite a while after rejoining the Confederate Army, Brigadier General Clarence Potter had worked underground, in War Department offices that officially didn’t exist. Intelligence tended to get quartered in places like that. For one thing, it was supposed to be secret. For another, if you didn’t have to look at spies, you could use what they gave you and still pretend to yourself that your hands were clean.

When he got the wreath around his three stars that meant promotion to general’s rank, he also got his unfortunate predecessor’s upstairs office. Being able to look out at Richmond instead of just walls was very nice. That is, it had been very nice till U.S. bombers started coming over Richmond in large numbers.

These days, only the foolhardy and those who had no choice worked above ground in the heart of the city. A lot of War Department operations had moved to the suburbs. Those that couldn’t had gone underground. Potter’s new office was only a few doors down from the one he’d had as a colonel. Returning to the subbasement, he’d displaced a captain, not the colonel who had the old room. As long as the electricity kept working, he could get the job done.

He stared at the papers on his desk through the bottoms of his bifocals. He was an erect, soldierly-looking man, nearer sixty than fifty, with iron-gray hair, a stern expression, and the same style of steel-rimmed glasses he’d worn as a major in Intelligence in the Army of Northern Virginia during the Great War (they hadn’t been bifocals then). The spectacles softened what would otherwise have been some of the coldest gray eyes anyone ever owned.

One of the reasons he glowered at those papers was that they should have got to him weeks before they did. Before the shooting started, he’d run Confederate espionage operations in the USA. Two countries hardly separated by language made spying here easier in many ways than it was in Europe. Some Confederate operatives had been in place in Washington and Philadelphia and elsewhere since before the Great War.

There were two problems with that. Shooting and moving armies and closed ordinary channels of mail and telegraphy made it harder for information to get across the border-which was why these papers were so late. The other problem was, what were the damnyankees doing in the CSA? Ease of spying cut both ways, worse luck.

Formally, counterintelligence was on Brigadier General Cummins’ football field, not his. He wasn’t sorry about that, or most of him wasn’t. Even guzzling coffee as if they’d outlaw it day after tomorrow, he did have to sleep every once in a while. He didn’t see how he could conjure up enough extra hours in the day to do a proper job if more responsibility landed on his head.

Jake Featherston and Nathan Bedford Forrest III, the head of the Confederate General Staff, thought he could handle it if he had to. He had a hard time quarreling with either of them, because they both had more in their laps than he did. But he was a relentless perfectionist in ways they weren’t, and couldn’t let go of things till they were exactly as he wanted them. He had enough insight to understand that that wasn’t always a desirable character trait. Understanding it and being able to do anything about it were two different things.

Someone knocked on the door. Down here, the rule was that you didn’t walk in till you were invited. Potter checked to make sure nothing sensitive was out in the open before he said, “Come in.”

“Thank you.” It was Nathan Bedford Forrest III. Potter started to come to attention; Forrest waved him back into his chair before the motion was well begun, saying, “Don’t bother with that silly nonsense.” The great-grandson of the cavalry raider in the War of Secession had a fleshier face than his famous ancestor, but his eyes, hooded under strong dark brows, proclaimed the relationship.

“Good morning, sir, or afternoon, or whatever time of day it is out there,” Potter said. “What can I do for you?”

Instead of answering right away, Forrest cocked his head to one side, an odd sort of smile on his face. “I purely love to listen to you talk, General-you know that?”

“You may be the only person in the Confederate States who does,” Potter answered. He’d gone to college up at Yale before the Great War. U.S. speech patterns and accent had rubbed off on him, not least because even then the Yankees had made things hard for Confederates in their midst. He’d wanted to fit in there, and he had-and he’d had a certain amount of trouble fitting into his own country ever since.

“But I know how useful it is to be able to talk like that,” Forrest said.

Quite a few of the C.S. spies Potter ran in the USA were Confederates who’d been raised or educated on the other side of the border. Sounding like a damnyankee helped a lot. It made real Yankees believe you were what you said you were, and was often more convincing than the proper papers. If you sounded right, you might never have to show your papers.

With a sour chuckle, Potter said, “It’s almost got me shot for a spy here a few times.”

“Well, that’s some of what I want to talk to you about.” Nathan Bedford Forrest III sank into the chair in front of Potter’s desk. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket of his butternut tunic, stuck one in his mouth, and offered Potter the pack. After Potter took one, Forrest lit them both.

They smoked for a couple of drags apiece. Potter knocked ash into a brass astray on the desk. He said, “If you think you’ve intrigued me… you’re right, dammit.”

The chief of the General Staff grinned at him, unabashed. “I hoped I might, to tell you the truth. I’m getting up a volunteer battalion I’m going to want you to help me vet.”

“Are you? A battalion of our people who can sound like damn-yankees?” Potter asked. Forrest nodded. Potter sucked in smoke till the coal at the end of his cigarette glowed a furious red. After he let it out, he aimed another question at his superior: “Are you putting them in U.S. uniforms, too?”

Nathan Bedford Forrest III didn’t jump. Instead, he froze into immobility. He clicked his tongue between his teeth after fifteen seconds or so of silence. “Well, General,” he said at last, “you didn’t get the job you’ve got on account of you’re a damn fool. If I didn’t know that already, you just rubbed my nose in it like I’m a puppy getting house-trained.”

“If they’re captured in enemy uniform, the United States will shoot them for spies,” Potter said. “We won’t be able to say boo about it, either. Under the laws of war, they’ll have the right.”

“I understand that. Everybody who goes forward with this will understand it, too,” Forrest answered. “You have my word on that, General. I already told you once, this is a project for volunteers.”

“All right,” Potter said. “But I did want to remind you. As a matter of fact, for something like that I was obliged to remind you. So where exactly do I fit in?”

“You’re the fellow who’s been running people who can sound like damnyankees and act like damnyankees.” Forrest stubbed out his smoke and reached for the pack to have another one. When he offered it to Potter this time, Potter shook his head. The chief of the General Staff lit up again. He sucked in smoke, then continued, “If they can be halfway convincing to you, they’ll be good enough to convince the enemy, too.”

“It’s not just accent.” Potter scratched his chin as he thought. “You can get away with flattening out the vowels some. Even swallowing r’s might make the Yankees think you’re from Boston or somewhere up there-what even the Yankees call a Yankee. But some things will kill you if the USA hears ’em coming out of your mouth.”

“Banknote is one,” Forrest said. “I know they say bill instead.”

“Just about everybody knows that one-just about everybody thinks about money a good deal,” Potter agreed. Nathan Bedford Forrest III laughed, though Potter hadn’t been kidding, or not very much. He went on, “They don’t say tote up there, either-it’s carry. And they mostly say bucket instead of pail, though you might get by with that one. You won’t ever get away with windscreen; they always say windshield. They might think somebody who says windscreen is an Englishman, but that won’t help anybody in a U.S. uniform much, either.”

“No, not hardly.” Forrest laughed once more: a grim laugh.

“What will you be using them for?” Potter quickly held up his right hand. “No, don’t tell me. Let me figure it out.” He thought for a little while, then nodded-at least as much to himself as to his superior. “Infiltrators. They have to be infiltrators. Get them behind the lines, giving false directions, sabotaging vehicles, putting explosives in ammunition dumps, and they’ll be worth a lot more than a battalion of ordinary men.”

Again, Forrest gave him a careful once-over before speaking. When he did, he said, “Shall I put you in an operational slot, Potter? If you want your own division, it’s yours for the asking.”

“I think I can do the damnyankees more harm right where I am, sir,” Potter replied. Nathan Bedford Forrest III didn’t argue with him. He thought a bit more. “Do you know what the really elegant part of the scheme is? As soon as the damnyankees realize we’ve got men behind their lines like that, nobody in a green-gray uniform will trust anybody he doesn’t know. And that’ll last for the rest of the goddamn war.”

Forrest slowly nodded. He looked like a man trying to show nothing on his face at a poker table. Did that mean he or whoever’d come up with the notion hadn’t thought so far ahead? Potter would have bet it did. He almost asked, but checked himself. That might have looked like showing off.

One other thing did occur to him, though: “You know they’ll do the same thing to us? They just about have to, if for no other reason than to make us as scared of our own shadows as they will be.”

“I’ll… take that up with the President,” Forrest said. Were the raiders in Yankee uniform Jake Featherston’s idea? Potter wouldn’t have been surprised; Featherston had a genius for making trouble in nasty ways. He also had the gifted amateur’s problem of not seeing all the consequences of his troublemaking.

This long war, for instance. He really thought Al Smith would make peace. Potter muttered unhappily. If only the Yankees would have quit. Jake Featherston would have gone down in history then, no doubt about it. Things wouldn’t be so easy now. He asked Forrest, “What do you think of Charlie La Follette?”

“We’ll just have to see,” the chief of the General Staff replied. “So far, he sounds like Smith. But who knows what he’ll be like once he gets out from under the other fellow’s shadow? How about you? You probably know more about him than I do.”

“I doubt it. Who pays attention to the Vice President?” Potter said, and Forrest laughed, again for all the world as if he’d been joking. He went on, “I think you’ve got it about right. Doesn’t look like he’s going to pack in the war.”

“No, it sure doesn’t. Too bad. It’d make our lives easier if he did, that’s for damn sure,” Forrest said-one more thing Potter thought he had about right.

They’d pulled Armstrong Grimes’ regiment, or what was left of it, out of the lines in Utah for a while. The corporal and his buddies had to march away. The powers that be saved most of their trucks to haul men to and from fights they thought more important than the one against the Mormon rebels.

Marching out meant he and his fellow survivors tramped past the men coming up to take their places in Provo. Telling who was who couldn’t have been easier. The new fish had fresh uniforms, and carried very full packs on their backs. They were clean-shaven. They looked bright and eager.

Armstrong and the rest of the veterans stank. He couldn’t remember when he’d last bathed or changed his underwear. He was as whiskery as any of the others. His uniform had seen better days, too. He carried nothing he couldn’t do without. And his eyes went every which way at once. They were the eyes of a man who never knew which way trouble was coming from, only that it was coming.

Most of the soldiers pulling out had eyes like that. The rest just stared straight ahead as they trudged along. The thousand-yard stare belonged to men who’d seen and done too much. Maybe rest would turn them back into soldiers again. Maybe nothing would. The way war was these days, it had no trouble overwhelming a man.

Some of the veterans jeered at the rookies: “Aren’t you pretty?” “Aren’t you sweet?” “Do your mothers know you’re here?” “Where do you want your body sent?”

The men going into the line didn’t say much in return. They eyed the troops they were replacing like people in a zoo eyeing tigers and wolves. But no bars stood between them and the veterans. They plainly feared they’d get bitten if they teased the animals. They were right, too.

“Got a cigarette, Sarge?” Grimes asked. He was a big man-he’d been a second-string lineman on his high-school football team what seemed a million years ago and was actually just over one. Under the whiskers, his face was long and oval like his mother’s, but he had his old man’s dark hair and eyes.

“Here you go.” Rex Stowe pulled one out of a pack.

“Thanks.” Armstrong lit up and sucked in smoke. He was named for George Armstrong Custer; his father had been born in the same little Ohio town as the hero of the Second Mexican War and the Great War. Armstrong was born in Washington, D.C., where Merle Grimes settled down and married after a war wound from which he still limped. He’d had a comfortable postwar career as a minor government functionary. He and the rest of the family probably weren’t comfortable now. Washington was too close to the border with the CSA to be safe, though as far as Armstrong knew his father and mother and younger sister were well.

A middle-aged woman and a couple of little kids stood in the rubble by the side of the track and watched the U.S. soldiers go by. Silent hatred burned in their eyes. Of itself, Armstrong’s Springfield swung a couple of inches toward them. Plenty of Mormon women fought alongside their husbands and brothers and sons. Plenty of kids threw homemade grenades and firebombs-Featherston Fizzes, people called them. You never could tell, even with people behind the lines.

“They don’t like it that you’re smoking,” Stowe said.

No mere cigarette could have made them look like that. They wished him straight to hell. If they’d had weapons, they would have done their best to send him there.

Every civilian he saw looked at him like that. He knew there were people in Utah who weren’t Mormons. The Mormon majority called anybody who wasn’t one of them a gentile. Even Jews were gentiles here. One of Armstrong’s buddies was a New York City guy named Yossel Reisen. He thought that was funny as the devil.

But a lot of the so-called gentiles had joined their Mormon neighbors in rising up against the USA. Armstrong had trouble figuring that out. What had the U.S. government ever done to them? Had they hated the way Utah was treated so much that they wanted to leave the USA? Weren’t they a little crazy, or more than a little, if they had? Yeah, the rebels were brave, no doubt about it. But bravery had only so much to do with anything when it ran up against superior firepower.

The rebels were taking a while to lose, because the United States had other things to worry about and weren’t giving them anything like their full attention. But the Mormons and their pals had to be chewing locoweed if they thought they had a Chinaman’s chance of bailing out of the USA.

Rex Stowe said, “The way things are around here, I don’t even know if I want to come out of the line. Aren’t they likelier to jump us when our guard is down than when we’re looking for it?”

“Who says our guard’s going to be down? I don’t know about you, but I’m still watching all the goddamn time,” Armstrong answered.

Stowe considered, shrugged, and nodded. “You’ve got something there.”

On they slogged, past buildings pulverized in the slow, brutal U.S. advance. Armstrong wondered if there’d be enough Mormons left alive to keep their faith going after this rebellion finally got smashed. There had been the last time around, which struck him as a damn shame.

He marched for a solid day to get back to the recuperation center that had sprung up in Thistle, southeast of Provo. That put it out of range of Mormon guns-unless the rebels got sneaky, which they might well do. Barbed wire and machine-gun nests around the center made the place seem like a prisoner-of-war camp, but the guns faced out, not in.

Once inside the perimeter, Armstrong followed signs to a bank of showers and then to a delousing station. The showers were cold. His father had talked about hot water as part of the delousing process, but times had changed. They sprayed him with something that smelled like poison gas instead of boiling him or soaking him or whatever they’d done in his old man’s day.

“What is this shit?” he asked the guy doing the spraying.

“It’s like Flit, only more so. It really kills bugs,” the other soldier answered, and sprayed the naked man in line behind him.

They didn’t bother trying to get his uniform clean. That would have defeated Job’s patience. They issued him fresh clothes instead, from long johns on out. He felt like a new man.

The new man got a feed of bacon and real eggs and hash browns and toast and jam. Most of what he’d eaten lately had come out of cans or cartons. This felt like heaven, especially since he could pile as much as he wanted on his mess tray. After about three breakfasts’ worth, he said, “That’s a little better.”

Rex Stowe had eaten at least as much. “Yeah, a little,” he agreed. “I expect I’ll be able to handle lunch, though.”

“Oh, fuck, yes.” Armstrong took that for granted.

Yossel Reisen sat on Armstrong’s other side. He’d also put away a hell of a lot, though he skipped the bacon. He often swapped ration cans, too, so he wouldn’t have to eat pork. He gulped down a big white china mug full of coffee pale with fresh cream. “Damn good,” he said-he was at least as foul-mouthed as anybody else.

“Ask you something?” Armstrong said to him, and waited for him to nod. “You already did your conscript time, right? And then they sucked you back in?”

“Yeah, that’s true. You know it is,” Yossel answered. “So what?”

“So how come I’m a corporal when I’ve been in less than a year and you just made PFC?” Armstrong asked. “They should’ve given you two stripes the minute you came back, and you ought to be at least a sergeant by now.”

Reisen shrugged. “You know who my aunt is.” It wasn’t a question.

“Well, sure,” Armstrong said. Everybody knew Yossel’s aunt had been married to the President and was a Congresswoman herself. “You don’t make a big deal out of it, the way a lot of guys would. But that ought to get you promoted faster, right, not slower?”

“I don’t want it to.” Yossel Reisen spoke with quiet emphasis. “I don’t want anybody giving me anything on account of Aunt Flora. I just want to be a regular guy and get what regular guys get. I know damn well I earned the stripe I’ve got. If somebody handed it to me, what would it be worth?”

Armstrong was chewing a big mouthful of bacon, so he couldn’t answer right away. If he were related to somebody famous, he would have milked it for all it was worth. A cushy job counting brass buttons five hundred miles away from guns going off sounded great to him.

Yossel went on, “When my Uncle David got conscripted in the last war, my aunt was already in Congress. She could have pulled strings for him. He wouldn’t let her. He lost a leg. He’s proud of what he did. He wouldn’t have it any different.”

He’s out of his fucking mind, Armstrong thought. And yet his own father was unmistakably proud of his war wound, too. No doubt he’d screamed his head off when he got it, just like anybody else when a bullet bit him. Memory did strange things, no doubt about it.

“Have it your way,” Armstrong said when at last he swallowed. “You pull your weight. Anybody tells you anything else, kick his ass for him.”

“Thanks,” Reisen said. “You, too.” Armstrong followed the bacon with a swig of coffee. Till he got in the Army, he’d always been half-assed about things, doing enough to get by and not another nickel’s worth. You couldn’t do that once you put on the uniform, though. It might get you killed. Even if it didn’t, it would make your buddies hate you. If you let your buddies down, they’d let you down, too-and that would get you killed. Having somebody he cared about tell him he was all right felt damn good.

After they ate, they went over to a barracks hall. It was cheap plywood, and probably better suited to prisoners on the U.S. side. Armstrong wasn’t inclined to be critical. He threw his few chattels into a footlocker at the end of a real cot with a real mattress and real bedding. Then he took off his shoes and threw himself down on the mattress. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” he said ecstatically. A real bed. The first real bed since… He’d tried to remember not so long before. He tried again, harder. He still couldn’t.

Nobody told him he had to get out of it. He was full. He was clean, in a clean uniform. Nobody was shooting at him or even near him. He allowed himself the luxury of taking off his shoes. Then, blissfully, he fell asleep.

As far as he could tell, he hadn’t changed position when reveille sounded the next morning. He yawned and stretched. He was still tired. But he wasn’t weary unto death anymore. He was also starved-he’d slept through the lunch that had sounded so inviting and dinner, too, damn near slept the clock around.

By the way the rest of the men in the hall rose, they’d done nothing much in the nighttime, either. Some of them had had the energy to strip to their shorts and get under the covers instead of lying on top of them. Maybe tonight, Armstrong told himself.

He made an enormous pig of himself again at breakfast. Then he went back to the barracks and flopped down again. He didn’t fall asleep right away this time. He just lay there, marveling. He didn’t have to go anywhere. He didn’t have to do anything. He didn’t have to have eyes in the back of his head-though having them doubtless was still a good thing. He could just ease back and relax. He wondered if he still remembered how. He aimed to find out, for as long as he had in this wonderful place.

Jefferson Pinkard hadn’t been in Texas since he headed home to Birmingham after the Great War ended. He’d fought north of where he was now, but the country around Snyder wasn’t a whole lot different from what he’d known half a lifetime earlier: plains cut by washes, with low rises here and there. The sky went on forever, and the landscape seemed to do the same.

Bulldozers were kicking dust up into that endless sky right now. Along with their diesel snorting, the sounds of saws and hammers filled the air. Camp Determination would seem to go on forever when it got finished, too. Jeff had run Camp Dependable near Alexandria, Louisiana, for years. Once Determination got done, you’d be able to drop Dependable into it and not even know the older camp was there.

The barbed-wire perimeter stretched and stretched and stretched. A lot of people would go through Camp Determination. It had to be able to hold them all. And Pinkard had to make sure nobody got out who wasn’t supposed to. Guard towers outside the walls had gone up before the barracks inside. Machine guns were already in place inside the towers. Anybody who tried to escape would be real sorry real fast-but probably not for long.

Stalking along outside the perimeter, Jeff looked up at each tower he passed. He’d climbed up into all of them, checking their fields of fire. If you wanted something like that done right-hell, if you wanted anything done right-you were better off doing it yourself.

His black, shiny boots scuffed still more dust into the air. He wore three stars on each collar tab, the equivalent of a colonel’s rank. But he was called Standard Leader, not Colonel. He had a Freedom Party rank, not one from the Army. His uniform was of the same cut as a colonel’s, but gray rather than butternut.

Tunic and trousers both had some extra room for his belly. He still carried muscle under the fat, though; he’d been a steelworker till he got conscripted and for a while after the war, and no weakling ever went into the Sloss Works. If he scowled more often than he smiled, that was true of most people who bossed other people around.

After he got done prowling the perimeter, he went inside the camp. He carried a submachine gun with a full magazine when he did. So did all the whites who went inside. He had another man with him, too. The rule was that no white man went in alone. He’d made the rule. He lived up to it.

The construction-gang bosses were white. Negroes did most of the actual work, building the barracks where they would later live… for a while. If they did a lousy job, they had only themselves to blame.

Pinkard checked with the straw bosses. He could tell by looking that things were pretty close to being on schedule. The bosses blamed the rain that had come through a few days earlier for what delays there were. “Make it up,” Jeff told them. “We’ll open on time, or I’ll know the reason why. And if we don’t, I won’t be the only one who’s sorry. Have you got that?”

He was bigger than most of the gang bosses, and he had a loud, rasping voice, and everybody knew he was in good odor in Richmond. People might grumble about him behind his back, but nobody had the nerve to get mouthy to his face.

There was also another reason for that. Jeff Pinkard didn’t just talk to the construction-gang bosses. He poked his nose in everywhere, as had been his habit ever since he started taking care of prisoners during the civil war between the Emperor of Mexico and the U.S.-backed republican rebels after the Great War ended.

He went up to a colored man nailing boards to the side of a barracks unit. “You got everything you need to do your job?” he demanded.

“Yes, suh. Sure do,” the Negro answered. “Got me a hammer an’ plenty o’ nails.” He looked Pinkard in the eye. “You give me a rifle an’ plenty o’ bullets, I do a job on you.”

“I bet you would,” Pinkard said. “But you tried that, and they caught you.” Most of the laborers were men taken in rebellion against the CSA. “If you try and you lose, this is what you get.”

“I ain’t got my population reduced yet,” the black man said, and went back nailing up boards.

Population reduction and its variants had been Confederate slang for a little while now. I’ll reduce your population, you bastard! an angry man might shout, when he meant no more than, I’ll fix you! Used that way, the phrase wasn’t so heavily freighted with meaning. But, like a lot of slang, it sprang from something that was literally true. More Negroes, many more, were going into camps all over the CSA than were coming out-coming out alive, anyhow.

Jeff Pinkard eyed the colored man with the hammer in his hand. How did he mean what he’d just said? Was it only slang in his mouth, or had he seen enough to understand exactly where the slang came from? Jeff wondered, but he didn’t ask. As long as it was possible for Negroes to stay optimistic, they made more docile, more cooperative prisoners. Men who were sure they were doomed anyhow had nothing to lose. They caused trouble no matter what it cost them. Better to keep them as happy as you could.

That wasn’t real happy. Several Negroes asked Jeff if they could have bigger rations. He just shook his head and kept walking. They didn’t complain too much. The grits and occasional beans or biscuits they got didn’t quite amount to a starvation diet. The ration was just small enough to remind people it should have been larger.

The workers had no shortage of building supplies. Ferdinand Koenig, the C.S. Attorney General, had promised Pinkard a railroad spur would run to Camp Determination, and he’d kept his word. Everything Jeff needed came right to his front door. As soon as the camp was finished, trainloads of prisoners would come right to his front door, too. It wouldn’t be very long.

More colored prisoners were paving the road that led into Camp Determination and the big parking area at the end of it. Along with the railroad spur, there’d be plenty of truck traffic going in and out of the camp. Jeff smiled to himself. That had been his idea, back at Camp Dependable. But there he hadn’t had the room to do things right. Here, he did. And if anybody came up with something better than trucks, he’d have room for that, too, whatever it turned out to be. Nobody’d improved on trucks yet, but you never could tell what someone might think up.

“You make sure you get that concrete nice and smooth,” Jeff barked to a Negro working on the lot.

“Oh, yes, suh, I do dat. You don’t gots to worry none. Everything be fust-rate. We takes care of it.” As any Negro would when a white boss bore down on him, this one was quick and ready to promise the moon. Whether he’d deliver was liable to be a different question.

Pinkard didn’t care so much about the barracks halls. But the parking lot and the road-they really counted. The trucks were important and expensive. They had to be well taken care of. “I’ll have my eye on you,” Pinkard growled. “You think I’m kidding, you’ll be sorry.”

“Yes, suh.” The Negro didn’t get up from his hands and knees. He probably wanted to show Jeff how diligent he was. “Don’t you fret none.”

As things advanced here, more barbed wire with gates in it would separate the road and the lot from the rest of the camp. He had everything planned. The blueprints for Camp Determination had come out of Richmond, but he had permission from Ferd Koenig to modify them as he thought best. This was going to be his camp, and by God it would work the way he wanted it to.

Guards saluted as he and his silent gun-toting companion left the perimeter. He’d need more manpower when the camp got going, but he didn’t expect that to be a problem. The Confederate Veterans’ Brigades had a guard-training center not far outside of Fort Worth. The way Jeff saw things, the men who came out of it would probably do better than the cops and tough guys who made up most of the guard force now. They’d really know what they were supposed to do.

He had his own office by the growing camp. Telephone and telegraph lines connected it to the outside world. That was more so Richmond could send him instructions than so he could reach other places, but the powers that be back in the capital didn’t mind if he did.

When he walked up to the telegrapher, the young man didn’t quite sit at attention, but he came close. Jeff said, “Billy Ray, I want you to send a wire to Edith Blades in Alexandria, Louisiana. You’ve got the address, right?”

“Yes, sir, Standard Leader!” Billy Ray said. If he didn’t have the address of his boss’s fiancee handy, he’d be in trouble. He grabbed a message pad and poised a pencil over it. “Go ahead, sir.”

“Right.” Jeff paused a moment to work out what he wanted to say before he said it. He always felt like a damn fool when he had to mumble and stumble and backtrack. “Here we go… ‘Dear Edith, All well here. Progress on schedule. Will be back to visit in about two weeks. Expect things to start up in less than two months. Miss you and the boys. See you all soon. Love, Jeff.’ ” He tried to keep things short, even if he wasn’t paying for the wire out of his own pocket.

“Let me read that back for you, sir.” Billy Ray did. He had it right. The boys had surprised him the first time he heard it; he hadn’t known Edith was a widow. Now he took them for granted.

“Send it off,” Jeff told him. The telegraph key started clicking.

Jeff went into his inner office. He’d been careful about more than keeping things short. Suppose the damnyankees got their hands on this wire. He hadn’t given his last name or his rank. He hadn’t said anything specifically about the camp, either. Anybody who didn’t already know what he was talking about wouldn’t be able to make much sense of it. He sounded like a drummer or an efficiency expert, not a camp commandant.

I damn well am an efficiency expert, he thought. A lot of the changes he’d made to the blueprints involved smoothing things out, clearing up bottlenecks, avoiding trouble wherever he could. The parking area was bigger than it had been in the original drawings, and the road leading to and from it better laid out. A lot of trucks would go in and out of Camp Determination. A hell of a lot of Negroes would come in and go out.

He knew where the road out of camp led. At the end of it, there was another barbed-wire enclosure. That one kept people out, not in. Texas had a hell of a lot of prairie. If you put some dozer crews on the job, they could dig a lot of trenches without drawing much notice. Fill those trenches full of bodies, bulldoze the dirt back over them, and dig some new ones…

Jeff nodded to himself. The Negroes who got into trucks would think they were on their way to some other camp. So would the ones who stayed behind. They wouldn’t know the exhaust fumes were routed into the airtight passenger box, not till too late they wouldn’t.

Camp Determination was big. The burial ground was even bigger. The Freedom Party was-was determined, by God! — to solve the Negro problem in the CSA once and for all. It would take a lot of work, but Jeff figured they could do it.