Drive to the East

VII

Mail call!”

Like most of his buddies, Armstrong Grimes perked up when he heard that. It wasn’t even so much that he expected mail. The only person who regularly wrote to him was his father, and Merle Grimes’ letters weren’t the most exciting in the world. But being reminded that people back home remembered the soldiers here in Utah were alive counted for a good deal.

“Jackson!” called the corporal with the mail bag.

“He’s on sentry duty,” somebody said. “I’ll take ’em for him.”

The soldier with the sack handed him half a dozen letters held together with a rubber band. He pulled out another rubber-banded clump. “Reisen!”

“I’m here,” Yossel Reisen answered, and grabbed his mail. He had a lot of family back in New York, and got tons of letters.

“Donovan!” The noncom with the mail held up some more letters and a package.

“He got wounded last Tuesday,” one of the gathered soldiers answered. The man with the mail bag started to put back the package. The soldier said, “If that’s cake or candy, we’ll keep it.”

“Depends,” the corporal said. “How bad is he?”

Etiquette required an honest answer to that question. After brief consultation, another soldier said, “He can probably eat it. Send it back to the field hospital.”

Some more names were called, including Armstrong’s. He had a letter from his father and, he was surprised to see, one from Aunt Clara. His aunt, a child of his grandmother’s old age, was only a couple of years older than he was. They’d fought like cats and dogs ever since they were tiny. He wondered what the devil she wanted with him now.

Before he could open it, the guy with the sack called, “Appleton!”

Tad Appleton’s birth name was something Polish and unpronounceable. That, at the moment, didn’t matter. Three men put what did matter into two words: “He’s dead.” One of them added, “Stopped a.50-caliber round with his face, poor bastard.” Armstrong found himself grinding his teeth. When Appleton’s body got back to Milwaukee, they’d bury him in a closed casket. No undertaker in the world could fix up what that bullet had done to him.

“Here, then.” The soldier with the mail tossed a package to the men gathered around him. That also followed etiquette-such things shouldn’t go to waste.

More letters and packages got passed out, till the sack was empty except for mail belonging to the wounded and the dead. The corporal with the sack bummed a cigarette and stood around talking with the men to whom he’d delivered the mail. A few soldiers who hadn’t got anything stood there dejectedly. Their buddies consoled them as best they could. That wasn’t just for politeness’ sake. Armstrong had seen more than one man, forgotten by the folks back home, stop caring whether he lived or died.

He opened the letter from his aunt. It turned out to be a wedding announcement. Clara was marrying somebody named Humphrey Baxter. “Humphrey?” Armstrong said. “Who the hell names their kid Humphrey?”

“There’s that actor,” Reisen said. “You know, the fellow who was in The Maltese Elephant.”

“Oh, yeah. Him.” Armstrong nodded. “This ain’t him, though, I’ll tell you that. This guy’s probably a bad actor-you know what I mean? He’s our age-gotta be-and he’s not in the Army. He’s pulling some strings somewhere, sure as hell.” He eyed the announcement with distaste. “Damn paper’s too stiff to wipe my ass with.” He scaled it away.

The letter from his father mentioned Clara’s upcoming wedding, too. Merle Grimes had little to say about Clara’s intended. Armstrong nodded to himself. His old man had seen the elephant, and took pride in it. He wouldn’t have much use for somebody who’d managed to wiggle out of conscription.

Yossel Reisen was methodically going through his mail. He held up one letter. “My aunt was in a meeting room when that auto bomb went off in front of Congress.” He always played down being the nephew of the former First Lady. If he hadn’t downplayed it, Armstrong didn’t suppose he would have had to put the uniform back on at all. Unlike this Humphrey Baxter item, Yossel pulled his weight.

“She get out all right?” Armstrong asked.

“Uh-huh. Not a scratch, she says,” Reisen answered. “She wasn’t near the front of the building, thank God.”

“That’s good,” Armstrong said, and then, “Goddamn Mormons.” The Latter-Day Saints hadn’t claimed responsibility for the recent wave of auto bombs, but Deseret Wireless didn’t go out of its way to deny anything, either. Its tone was, Take that! Serves you right, too.

“They look just like anybody else,” Yossel said. “That makes them hard to catch, hard to stop.”

“Don’t it just?” Armstrong’s agreement was ungrammatical but heartfelt. He added, “I don’t like the way Confederate Connie goes on and on about it.”

“Well, who would?” Yossel paused. “Even when you know she’s full of crap, though, she’s fun to listen to.”

“Oh, hell, yes!” Armstrong’s agreement there was heartfelt, too. Nobody he knew took Confederate Connie even a quarter of the way seriously. Like every wireless broadcaster from the CSA, she was Jake Featherston’s mouthpiece. But a doozie of a mouthpiece she was, and she sounded like a doozie of a piece, period-she had the sexiest voice Armstrong had ever heard.

She spent a lot of time between records gloating about the auto bombs that had U.S. cities so on edge. “Now you-all know how we feel,” she would say. “We’ve been putting up with these contraptions for years. You laughed when it happened to us. Do you-all reckon we’re laughing now?” She would pause. She would giggle. “Well, you know what?… You’re right!”

Yossel Reisen opened another letter. “Who’s this one from?” Armstrong asked, having already gone through his meager mail.

“My Uncle David.”

“Which one’s he again?” Armstrong asked-Yossel had a lot of relatives.

“The one who lost a leg in the last war,” Reisen answered. “He’s a right-wing Democrat now. It drives Aunt Flora nuts.”

“Oh, yeah.” Armstrong nodded. Yes, his own father was inordinately proud of the wound that made him walk with a cane. Yossel’s uncle David overtrumped Dad’s wound in a big way. Come to that, Yossel’s father had got killed before he was even born. Sure as hell, some people had had a tougher time of it than Merle Grimes, even if he wouldn’t admit it this side of the rack. Armstrong asked, “What’s he got to say?”

“He’s talking about the auto bombs in New York City,” Yossel answered, not looking up from the letter. “He says there were four of them-one on Wall Street, one in the Lower East Side where I grew up, and two in Times Square.”

“Two?” Armstrong said.

“Two,” Yossel repeated, his face grim. “One to make a mess, and then another one that went off fifteen minutes later, after the cops and the firemen showed up.”

“Oh.” Armstrong grimaced. “That’s a dirty trick. Confederate Connie hasn’t talked about anything like that.”

“Probably doesn’t want to give the shvartzers in the CSA ideas if they’re listening to her,” Yossel said. Armstrong nodded; that made pretty good sense. Yossel went on, “Waste of time, I bet. If the Mormons can figure it out, you’ve got to figure the shvartzers can, too.”

“Bet you’re right. It’s a goddamn lousy war, that’s all I’ve got to say. Poison gas and blowing the other guy’s cities to hell and gone and both sides with maniacs blowing their own cities to hell and gone… Some fun,” Armstrong said. “And these fucking Mormons won’t quit till the last one’s dead-and his ghost’ll haunt us.”

As if on cue, somebody shouted, “Incoming!” Armstrong threw himself flat even before he heard the shriek of the incoming round. It was a terrifying wail. The Mormons had something homemade and nasty. Artillerymen called it a spigot mortar. Most soldiers called the projectiles-each about the size of a wastebasket with fins-screaming meemies.

When they hit, they made a roar like the end of the world. They were stuffed with explosives and scrap iron, to the point where they were almost flying auto bombs themselves. The only drawback they had that Armstrong could see was that, like most of the Mormons’ improvised weapons, they couldn’t reach very far. But when they did get home…

Blast picked him up and slammed him down again, as if a professional wrestler-or possibly God-had thrown him to the canvas. He tasted blood. When he brought a hand up to his face, he found his nose was bleeding, too. He felt his ears, but they seemed all right. After he spat, his mouth seemed better. His nose went on dripping blood down his face and, as he straightened, onto the front of his tunic. That was all right, or not too bad. Anything more and he would have worried about what the screaming meemie had done to his insides.

Instead, he worried about what the horrible thing had done to other people. The corporal who’d brought the mail forward was torn to pieces. If not for the sack, Armstrong wouldn’t have recognized him. Poor bastard wasn’t even a front-line soldier. Wrong place, wrong time, and he’d make another closed-casket funeral.

Shouts of, “Corpsman!” rose from half a dozen places. There weren’t enough medics close by to see to everybody at once. Armstrong bandaged wounds and tied off one tourniquet and gave morphine shots with the syrettes in the soldiers’ first-aid kits: all the things he’d learned how to do since he got thrown into battle the summer before.

Yossel Reisen was doing the same sorts of things. He also had a bloody nose, and he’d put a bandage on the back of his own left hand. More blood soaked through it. “There’s a Purple Heart for you,” Armstrong said.

Reisen told him where he could put the Purple Heart, and suggest that he not close the pin that held it on a uniform.

Armstrong gave back a ghastly grin. “Same to you, buddy, only sideways,” he said. They both laughed. It wasn’t funny-nothing within some considerable distance of where a screaming meemie went off was funny-but it kept them both going and it kept them from shrieking. Sometimes men who’d been through too much would come to pieces in the field. Armstrong had seen that a few times. It was even less lovely than what shell fragments could do. They only ruined a man’s body. When his soul went through the meat grinder…

Belatedly, U.S. field guns started shelling the place from which the screaming meemie had come. Odds were neither the men who’d launched it nor the tube from which it started its deadly flight were there anymore.

“Bastards.” Even Armstrong wasn’t sure whether he was talking about the Mormons on the other side of the line or the gunners on his own. It fit both much too well.

“Need to talk to you for a minute in my office, Xerxes,” Jerry Dover said when Scipio walked into the Huntsman’s Lodge.

Scipio was already sweating from the walk to work in formalwear under the hot Augusta sun. When his boss told him something like that, he started sweating all over again. But he said the only thing he could: “Be right theah, suh.” Maybe-he dared hope-this had to do with restaurant business. Even if it didn’t, though, he remained at the white man’s beck and call.

Dover’s office was as crowded and as filled with lists of things to do as ever. The restaurant manager worked hard. Scipio never would have presumed to think otherwise. The ashtray on the desk was full of butts, a couple of them still smoldering.

Dover paused to light yet another cigarette, sucked in smoke, blew it out, and eyed Scipio. “What’s your address, over in the Terry?” he asked.

That wasn’t what Scipio had expected. “Same one you got on all my papers, suh,” he answered. “I ain’t moved or nothin’.”

“For true?” Jerry Dover said. “No bullshit? No getting cute and cagey?”

“Cross my heart an’ hope to die, Mistuh Dover.” Scipio made the gesture. “How come you needs to make sure o’ dat?”

His boss didn’t answer, not right away. He smoked the cigarette down to a little dog-end in quick, savage puffs, then stubbed it out and lit a new one. When he did speak, he went off on a tangent: “I don’t reckon your wife and your young ’uns have ever seen the inside of this place.”

“No, suh, they ain’t never,” Scipio agreed, wondering what the hell Dover was going on about. The restaurant-by which he naturally thought of the part the customers never saw-was crowded enough with the people who had to be there: cooks, waiters, busboys, dishwashers. Others would have fit in as well as feathers on a frog. The manager had to know that better than he did.

No matter what Jerry Dover knew, he said, “Why don’t you bring ’em by tomorrow night when you come in for your shift? They get bored, they can spend some time here in the office.”

“Suh, my missus, she clean white folks’ houses. She already be at work when I comes in here,” Scipio said.

Dover frowned. “Maybe you tell her to take the day off tomorrow so she can come in with you.”

“People she work fo’ ain’t gwine like dat,” Scipio predicted dolefully. Blacks in the CSA never had been able to risk antagonizing whites. With things the way they were now, even imagining such a thing was suicidal.

The second cigarette disappeared as fast as the first one had. Dover lit a third. He blew a stream of smoke up at the ceiling. “Scipio,” he said softly, “this is important.”

Scipio froze, there in the rickety chair across the desk from the restaurant manager. Jerry Dover used that name to remind Scipio who had the power here.

By why he would want to use that power for this purpose baffled the Negro. Sending him down to Savannah made sense. This? This seemed mere whim. A man who expended power on a whim was a fool.

In the tones of an educated white man, Scipio said, “Perhaps you will be good enough to tell me why you require my family’s presence, sir?”

Dover’s eyes widened. He laughed out loud. “Goddamn!” he said. “She told me you could do that, but I plumb forgot. That’s fucking amazing. You ought to go on the wireless instead of some of those muttonheads they’ve got.”

“As may be, sir,” Scipio answered, and Jerry Dover laughed again. The black man added, “You still have not answered my question.” He dared hope Dover would. Skin color was the most important thing in the CSA; no doubt about it. But accent ran color a close second. If he sounded like an educated white man, the presumption that he was what he sounded like ran deep.

But not deep enough, not here. Dover set the live cigarette in the ashtray, steepled his fingertips on the desk, and looked at Scipio over them. “It would be a good idea if you got ’em here,” was all he said. His own way of speaking didn’t come close to matching Scipio’s. By his nervous chuckle, he knew it, too.

Scipio wanted to ask, A good idea how? Why? He wanted to, but he didn’t. He’d pushed the white man as far as Dover was willing to go. Returning to the Congaree dialect that was his natural speech, Scipio said, “Reckon I do it, den.”

“Good,” Dover said. “I knew you were a smart fellow. If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t have wasted my time banging my gums at you in the first place. Now get your ass out there and go to work.”

“Yes, suh,” Scipio said, relieved to be back on familiar ground.

When his shift ended, policemen let him through the barbed-wire perimeter surrounding the Terry. They knew him. He had a dispensation to be out after curfew. He made it back to his block of flats without getting knocked over the head.

Then he had his next hurdle: persuading Bathsheba not to do what she usually did. “Why for he want us there?” she demanded.

“Dunno,” Scipio answered. “But he want it bad enough to use my fo’-true name.”

“Did he?” That made Bathsheba sit up and take notice. Worry in her voice, she asked, “You reckon he do somethin’ nasty if we don’t come?”

“Dunno,” Scipio said again, more unhappily than ever. “But I reckons y’all better do it.”

Bathsheba sighed heavily. “Miz Kent, she ain’t gonna be real happy with me. Miz Bagwell neither. But we come.”

When his children got up the next morning, they were even more bemused than his wife was. “Somethin’ bad liable to happen, Pa,” Cassius said. His hands bunched into fists. “Can we fight back?” He was more like the hunter and guerrilla for whom he’d been named than he had any business being.

“Odds is bad,” was all Scipio said. That gave his son very little to react against.

“Don’t know that I ever wants to go into the ofay part of Augusta no more,” Antoinette said. “They hates us there.”

“They hates we here, too,” Scipio answered. “You should oughta come, though. I don’t reckon Mistuh Dover playin’ games.” That wasn’t quite true. But he didn’t know what kind of game the manager was playing, and he couldn’t afford not to play along.

His wife and children dressed in their Sunday best for the unusual excursion. Since he was in his own formalwear, the family looked as if they were bound for a fancy wedding or a banquet. When they got to the barbed-wire perimeter, the cops and Freedom Party stalwarts and guards stared at them. There seemed to be more whites manning the perimeter than usual. Or is it just my nerves? Scipio wondered-nervously.

The policeman who checked passbooks had sent Scipio through any number of times. He raised an eyebrow to see the black man’s family accompanying him, but didn’t say anything about it. He was, within the limits of his job and his race, a decent fellow. A stalwart came up to talk to him. Scipio wondered if they would yell at him to halt and send Bathsheba and the children back. They didn’t, though.

When Scipio got to the Huntsman’s Lodge, he found that Aurelius also had his wife-a plump, dignified, gray-haired woman named Delilah-with him. Something was going on. He still didn’t know what, and wished he did.

They all got suppers of the sorts the cooks turned out for the waiters. Two or three other waiters and cooks-all of them men who’d worked at the Lodge for a while, and all of them also men who lived not far from Scipio and his family-also had family members with them.

Jerry Dover hovered over the Huntsman’s Lodge’s uncommon customers. He was fox-quick, fox-clever, and also, Scipio judged, fox-wary. “Thank y’all for being here today,” he said. “I’ve worked with your husbands and fathers for years, and I’ve never met y’all before. Hope I do again before too long.”

He was saying something between the lines. But not even Scipio, who knew he was doing it, could make out the words behind the words. He wanted to scratch his head. Instead, he had to go out and work his shift as if everything were normal.

It only seemed to last forever. In fact, it went as smoothly as most of the shifts he put in. He pocketed a few nice tips and got stiffed once, by a lieutenant-colonel with his left arm in a sling. Scipio hoped the next Yankee who shot him took better aim.

When he left the dining room after the Lodge closed, he found his family on the ragged edge of mutiny. “If I was any more bored, I’d be dead,” Cassius snarled.

“Thanks for bringin’ ’em by, Xerxes,” Jerry Dover said-now he used the alias that seemed to fit Scipio better than his real name these days. “Glad you could do it.”

“Uh-huh,” Scipio said, still puzzled about what was going on. Something, yes-but what? He nodded to Bathsheba, who was yawning. “Let’s go.”

The streets of the white part of Augusta were quiet and peaceful. When they got back to the fence around the Terry, another cop who knew Scipio let them through without any trouble about being out after curfew. He laughed as he opened a barbed-wire gate much like the one that would keep livestock in a pen. “You ain’t hardly gonna know the place,” he said. The rest of the goons at the gate thought that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.

Only little by little did Scipio and his family discover what they meant. At first, he just thought things seemed too quiet. Curfew or no curfew, there was usually a lot of furtive life on the dark streets of the Terry. A lot of it was dangerous life, but it was life. Tonight, no.

Tonight… Cassius figured it out first, from the number of doors standing open that shouldn’t have. “Do Jesus!” he exclaimed, his voice echoing in the empty street. “They done had another cleanout!”

As soon as he pointed it out, it was obvious he was right. The northern part of the Terry had been scooped up and sent off to camps-or somewhere-months before. As far as Scipio knew, nobody’d come back, either. Now the heart had been ripped out of the colored part of Augusta. And all in one day, Scipio thought dazedly. All in half a day, in fact. How long had they been planning this, to bring it off with such practiced efficiency? And where had they got the practice?

Bathsheba squeezed his hand, hard. “If it wasn’t fo’ Jerry Dover, they’d’ve got us, too,” she whispered.

And that was as true as what Cassius had said. Somehow, Dover had known ahead of time. He’d done what he could-or what he’d wanted to do. Now Scipio owed him not just one life but four. He thanked the God he mostly didn’t believe in for the debt. And he wondered how Jerry Dover would want it repaid.

For there would be a price. There was always a price. Scipio knew that in his bones, in his belly, in his balls. For a Negro in the CSA, there was always a price.

After his mother died, Cincinnatus Driver had watched his father like a hawk. He knew the stories about old, long-married couples where, when one spouse died, the other followed soon after, as if finding life alone not worth living.

But Seneca Driver seemed as well as ever. If anything, he seemed better than he had for some time. His shoulders came up; his back straightened. “I is free of a burden,” he said once. “That weren’t your mama we laid in the ground. Your mama was gone a long time ago. What we buried, that there was just the husk.”

Cincinnatus nodded. “I saw that, Pa. I saw that real plain and clear. Wasn’t sure you could.”

“Oh, I seen it,” his father said. “Couldn’t do nothin’ about it, but I seen it.”

If that last sentence wasn’t a summary of Negroes’ troubles in the Confederate States, Cincinnatus had never heard one. And the government and the Freedom Party had always moved more carefully in Kentucky than rumor said they did farther south. Kentucky had spent a generation in the USA. Negroes here knew what it meant to be citizens, not just downtrodden residents. Even some whites here were… less hostile than they might have been.

That meant the barbed-wire perimeter that went up around Covington’s colored district came as a special shock. Cincinnatus had heard that such things had happened elsewhere. He didn’t think they could here. Finding he was wrong rocked him. Finding he was wrong also trapped him. The perimeter included the bank of the Licking River, and included motorboats with machine guns on the river to make sure nobody tried cutting the wire there.

The first place Cincinnatus went when he found out what was going on was, inevitably, Lucullus Wood’s barbecue shack. He found the plump proprietor in a worse state of shock than he was. “They told me they wasn’t gonna do this,” Lucullus said. “They told me. They fuckin’ lied.” He sounded as dazed as a man staggering out of a train wreck.

Seeing Lucullus struck all in a heap discomfited Cincinnatus worse than the barbed wire itself. “What you gonna do about it?” he demanded. “What can you do about it?”

“Do Jesus! I dunno,” Lucullus answered. “They done ruined me when they done this.” Odds were he had that right. Almost as many whites as blacks had come to his place. No more. That perimeter would keep people out as well as keeping them in.

“You can still get word through.” That was a statement, not a question. Cincinnatus refused to believe anything different.

“What if I kin?” Lucullus didn’t deny it. He just spread his hands, pale palms up. “Ain’t gonna do me a hell of a lot of good. Who’s gonna pay any mind to a nigger all shut up like he was in jail? They gonna haul us off to them camps nobody never comes out of.”

That had a chilling feel of probability to Cincinnatus. Even so, he gave Lucullus the best answer he could: “What about Luther Bliss?” He hated the man, hated and feared him, but Bliss’ remained a name to conjure with. He hoped hearing it would at least snap Lucullus out of his funk and make him start thinking straight again.

And it worked. Lucullus very visibly gathered himself. “Mebbe,” he said. “But only mebbe, dammit. Freedom Party fellas is hunting Bliss right now like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Hell I wouldn’t,” Cincinnatus said. “If they know he’s around, they’ll want him dead. He’s too dangerous for them to leave him breathin’. Ain’t that all the more reason for you to git back in touch with him?”

“Mebbe,” Lucullus said again. “What kin he do, though? They gots police an’ them damn stalwarts all around. Anytime they wants to come in an’ start gettin’ rid of us…”

“We got guns. You got guns. You ain’t gonna tell me you ain’t got guns, ’cause I know you lie if you do,” Cincinnatus said. “They come in like that, they be sorry.”

“Oh, yeah.” Lucullus’ jowls wobbled as he nodded. “They be sorry. But we be sorrier. Any kind o’ fight like that, we loses. Guns we got is enough to make them fuckers think twice. Ain’t enough to stop ’em. Cain’t be, and you got to know that, too. They uses barrels, we ain’t got nothin’ ’cept Featherston Fizzes against ’em. They sends in Asskickers to bomb us flat, we ain’t even got that. We kin hurt ’em. They kin fuckin’ kill us, an’ I reckon they is lookin’ fo’ the excuse to do it.”

Cincinnatus grunted. Lucullus had to be right. Against the massed power of the CSA, the local Negroes would lose. And the Confederate authorities might well be looking for an excuse to move in and wipe them out. Which meant… “You got to git hold o’ Bliss,” Cincinnatus said again.

“What good it do me?” Lucullus asked sourly. “I done told you-”

“Yeah, you told me. But so what?” Cincinnatus said, and Lucullus stared at him. The barbecue cook usually dominated between them. Not now. Cincinnatus went on, “We’re all shut up in here. Bad things start happenin’ out past the wire, how could we have much to do with ’em? But you kin get hold of Luther Bliss, and that son of a bitch got other ofays who’ll do what he tell ’em to.”

Lucullus kept right on staring, but now in a new way. “Mebbe,” he said once more. This time, he didn’t seem to mean, You’re crazy. Even so, he warned, “Luther Bliss don’t care nothin’ about niggers just ’cause they’s niggers.”

“Shit, I know that. Luther Bliss hates everybody under the sun,” Cincinnatus said, startling a laugh out of Lucullus. “But the people Luther Bliss hates most are Freedom Party men and the Confederates who run things. We hate them people, too, so we’s handy for him.”

“Well, yeah, but the people he hates next most is Reds,” Lucullus said. “You got to remember, that don’t help me none.”

“You got any better ideas?” Cincinnatus demanded, and then, “You got any ideas at all?”

Lucullus glared at him. If anything, that relieved Cincinnatus, who didn’t like seeing the younger man paralyzed. Cincinnatus would have done almost anything to get Lucullus’ wits working again; enraging him seemed a small price to pay. Lucullus said, “I kin git hold o’ him. He kin do dat shit, no doubt about it. But how much good it gonna do us?”

“What do you mean?” Cincinnatus asked.

“They got the wire around us. We is in here. Whatever they wants to do with us-whatever they wants to do to us-they got us where they wants us. How we get out? How we get away?”

Cincinnatus laughed at him. “They gonna let us out. They gonna let a lot of us out, anyways.” Lucullus’ jaw dropped. Cincinnatus drove the point home: “Who’s gonna do their nigger work for ’em if they don’t? Long as they need that, we ain’t cooped up in here all the time.”

“You hope we ain’t,” Lucullus said, but a little spirit came back into his voice.

“Talk to Luther Bliss,” Cincinnatus repeated. “Hell, they let me out for anything, I’ll talk to him.”

“Like he listen to you,” Lucullus said scornfully. “You ain’t got no guns. You ain’t got no people who kin do stuff. I tells you somethin’-you git outa the barbed wire, you try an’ get your black ass back to the USA. Ain’t far-jus’ over de river.”

“Might as well be over the moon right now,” Cincinnatus said with a bitter laugh. “Confederate soldiers holdin’ that part of Ohio. By what I hear, they’re worse on colored folks than the Freedom Party boys are here. They reckon they’re United States colored folks, an’ so they got to be the enemy.” Cincinnatus thought that was a pretty good bet, too. He added, “ ’Sides, I ain’t leavin’ without my pa.”

“You is the stubbornest nigger ever hatched,” Lucullus said. “Onliest thing that hard head good for nowadays is gittin’ you killed.” He made shooing motions with his hands. “Go on. Git. I don’t want you ’round no mo’.”

Cincinnatus didn’t want to be in the barbecue place anymore. He didn’t want to be in Covington anymore. He didn’t want to be in Kentucky at all anymore. The trouble was, nobody else gave a damn what he wanted or didn’t want.

Cane tapping the ground ahead of him, he walked out for a better look at what the whites in Covington had done. He’d seen more formidable assemblages of barbed wire when he was driving trucks in the last war, but those had been made to hold out soldiers, not to hold in civilians. For that, what the cops and the stalwarts had run up would do fine.

Normally, making a fence out of barbed wire would have been nigger work. Whites had done it here, though. That worried Cincinnatus. If whites decided they could do nigger work, what reason would they have to keep any Negroes around in the CSA?

A swagbellied cop with a submachine gun strolled along outside the fence. He spat a brown stream of tobacco juice onto the sidewalk. The sun sparkled from the enameled Freedom Party pin on his lapel. Hadn’t Jake Featherston climbed to power by going on and on about how whites were better than blacks? How could they be better than blacks if they got rid of all the blacks? Then they would have to work things out among themselves. Race wouldn’t trump class anymore, the way it always had in the Confederacy.

That fat policeman spat again. His jaw worked as he shifted the chaw from one cheek to the other. Did he care about such details? Did the countless others like him care? Cincinnatus couldn’t make himself believe it. They’d get rid of Negroes first and worry about what happened after that later on.

Cincinnatus suddenly felt as trapped as Lucullus did. Up till now, the rumors about what the Confederates were doing to Negroes farther south in the CSA, things he’d heard at Lucullus’s place and the Brass Monkey and in other saloons, had seemed too strange, too ridiculous, to worry him. Now he looked out at the rest of Covington through barbed wire. It wasn’t even rusty yet; sunshine sparkled off the sharp points of the teeth. He couldn’t get out past it, not unless that cop and his pals let him. And they could reach into the colored district whenever they pleased.

He didn’t like the combination, not even a little bit. Except for trying to escape with his father as soon as he got even a halfway decent chance, though, he didn’t know what he could do about it.

I need a rifle, he thought. Reckon I can get one from Lucullus. They come after me, they gonna pay for everything they get.

Dead night again, and the Josephus Daniels creeping along through the darkness. Sam Carsten peered out at the black water ahead as if he could see the mines floating in it. He couldn’t, and he knew as much. He had to hope the destroyer escort had a good chart of these waters, and that she could dodge the mines. If she couldn’t… Some of them were packed with enough TNT to blow a ship high enough out of the water to show her keel to anybody who happened to be watching. Out on the open sea, he didn’t worry much about mines. Here in the narrow waters of Chesapeake Bay, he couldn’t help it.

At the wheel, Pat Cooley seemed the picture of calm. “We’re just about through the worst of it, sir,” he said.

“Glad to hear it,” Sam said. “If we go sky-high in the next couple of minutes, I’m going to remind you you said that.”

The exec chuckled. “Oh, I expect I’ll remember it myself.”

Sam set a hand on his shoulder. The kid was all right-not a nerve in his body, or none that showed. And he was a married man, too, which made it harder for him. “Family all right?” Carsten asked.

“Oh, yes, sir,” Cooley answered. “Jane’s over the chicken pox, and Sally didn’t catch ’em.” His wife had worried when his daughter came down with the ailment, because she didn’t remember having it as a little girl. If she hadn’t got chicken pox by now, though, she must have had them then, because anybody who could catch them damn well would.

Another twenty minutes crawled by in a day or two. The soft throb of the engines came up through Sam’s shoes. The sound, the feel, were as important as his own pulse. If they stopped, the ship was in mortal peril. As things were… “I think we’re out of it now,” Sam said.

Cooley nodded. “I do believe you’re right-except for the little bastards that came off their chains and started drifting.” He paused. “And unless one side or the other laid some mines nobody knows about that aren’t on our charts.”

“You’re full of cheerful thoughts today, aren’t you?” Sam said. Pat Cooley just grinned. Either or both of those things was perfectly possible, and both men knew it too well. Those weren’t the only nasty possibilities, either, and Sam also knew that only too well. He spoke into a voice tube: “You there, Bevacqua?”

“Not me, Skip,” came the voice from the other end. “I been asleep the last couple weeks.” A snore floated out of the tube.

“Yeah, well, keep your ears open while you’re snoozing. This is good submarine country,” Sam said.

“Will do, Skip,” Vince Bevacqua said. The petty officer was the best hydrophone man the Josephus Daniels carried, which was why he was on duty now. Back during the Great War, hydrophones had been as near worthless as made no difference. The state of the art had come a long way since then. Now hydrophones shot out bursts of sound waves and listened for echoes-it was almost like Y-ranging underwater. It gave ships like this one a real chance when they went after subs.

“Not the best submarine country,” Cooley observed. “Water’s pretty shallow.”

“Well, sure, Pat, but that’s not quite what I meant,” Sam said. “It’s good sub country because we’ve just made it past the minefields. When some people get through something like that, they go, ‘Whew!’ and forget they’re not all the way out of the woods. They get careless, let their guard down. And that’s when the bastards on the other side drop the hammer on them.”

The bridge was dark. Showing a light in crowded, contested waters like these was the fastest way Sam could think of to get the hammer dropped on him. In the gloom, he watched the exec swing toward him, start to say something, and then think twice. After a few seconds, Cooley tried again: “That’s… pretty sensible, sir.”

He sounded amazed, or at least bemused. Carsten chuckled under his breath. “You live and learn,” he told the younger man. “You’ve got an Academy ring. You got your learning all boiled down and served up to you, and that’s great. It gives you a hell of a head start. By the time you get to my age, you’ll be a four-striper, or more likely an admiral. I’ve had to soak all this stuff up the hard way-but I’ve had a lot longer to do it than you have.”

Again, Pat Cooley started to answer. Again, he checked himself so he could pick his words with care. Slowly, he said, “Sir, I don’t think that’s the kind of thing they teach you at Annapolis. I think it’s the kind of thing you do learn with experience-if you ever learn it at all. You’re-not what I expected when they told me I’d serve under a mustang.”

“No, eh?” Instead of chuckling, Sam laughed out loud now. “Sorry to disappoint you. My knuckles don’t drag on the deck-not most of the time, anyway. I don’t dribble tobacco juice down my front, and I don’t spend all my time with CPOs.” A lot of mustangs did hang around with ratings as much as they could: those were still the men they found most like themselves. Sam had been warned against that when he got promoted. He suspected every mustang did. A lot of them, though, didn’t listen to the warning. He had.

“Sir, you’re doing your best to embarrass me,” Cooley said after one more longish pause. “Your best is pretty good, too.” He laughed as Sam had. Unlike Sam, though, he sounded distinctly uneasy when he did it.

A tinny ghost, Vince Bevacqua’s voice floated out of the mouth of the tube: “Skipper, I’ve got a contact. Something’s moving down there-depth about seventy, range half a mile, bearing 085.”

“Seventy,” Sam echoed thoughtfully. That was below periscope depth. If the hydrophone man had spotted a submersible, the boat didn’t know the Josephus Daniels was in the neighborhood-unless it had spotted the destroyer escort and submerged before Bevacqua realized it was there. Sam found that unlikely. He knew how good the petty officer was… even if he didn’t hang around with him. “Change course to 085, Mr. Cooley,” he said, switching to business.

“I am changing course to 085, sir-aye aye,” the exec replied.

Sam tapped a waiting sailor on the shoulder. “Tell the depth-charge crews to be ready at my order.”

“Aye aye, sir.” The sailor dashed away. He didn’t care whether Sam was a mustang. To a kid like him, the Old Man was the Old Man, regardless of anything. And if the Old Man happened to be well on the way toward being an old man-that still didn’t matter much.

“I’ll be damned if he thinks we’re anywhere around, sir,” Bevacqua said, and then, “Whoops-take it back. He’s heard us. He’s picking up speed and heading for the surface.”

“Let’s get him,” Sam said. “Tell me when, and I’ll pass it on to the guys who toss ash cans.”

“Will do, Skipper.” Bevacqua waited maybe fifteen seconds, then said, “Now!”

“Launch depth charges!” Sam shouted through the PA system-no need to keep quiet anymore.

During the Great War, ash cans had rolled off over the stern. The state of the art was better now. Two projectors flung depth charges well ahead of the ship. The charges arced through the air and splashed into the ocean.

“All engines reverse!” Cooley said. Sam nodded. Depth charges bursting in shallow water could blow the bow off the ship that had launched them. Carsten recalled the pathetic signal he’d heard about from a destroyer escort that had had that misfortune befall her: I HAVE BUSTED MYSELF. If it happened to him, he’d be busted, too, probably all the way to seaman second class.

Even though the Josephus Daniels had backed engines, the ash cans did their damnedest to lift her out of the water. Sam felt as if somebody’d whacked him on the soles of his feet with a board. Water rose and then splashed back into the sea. More bursts roiled the Atlantic.

Somebody at the bow whooped: “She’s coming up!”

“Searchlights!” Sam barked, and the night lit up. He knew the chance he was taking. If C.S. planes spotted him before he settled the sub, he was in a world of trouble. Have to settle it quick, then, he thought.

Men spilled out of the damaged submersible’s conning tower and ran for the cannon on the deck. It was only a three-inch gun, but Carsten’s destroyer escort wasn’t exactly a battlewagon. If that gun hit, it could hurt.

“Let ’em have it!” Sam yelled. The forward gun spoke in a voice like an angry god’s. The antiaircraft cannon at the bow started barking, too. They were more than good enough to tear up an unarmored target like a sub. The enemy got off one shot, which went wild. Then men on that deck started dropping as if a harvester were rumbling down it.

“White flag!” Three people shouted the same thing at the same time.

“Cease fire!” Sam yelled through the intercom, and then, “If they make a move toward that gun, blow ’em all to hell!” He turned away from the mike and spoke to Cooley: “Approach and take survivors.”

“Aye aye, sir,” the exec said. He had a different worry: “I hope to hell she’s not one of our boats.”

“Gurk!” Sam said. That hadn’t even crossed his mind. It wasn’t impossible in these waters, one more thing he knew too well. They wouldn’t just bust him for that. They’d boot him out of the Navy.

As the Josephus Daniels drew closer, he breathed again. The shape of the conning tower and the lines of the hull were different from those of U.S. boats. And the sailors tumbling into life rafts wore dark gray tunics and trousers. They were Confederates, all right.

A last couple of men popped out of the hatch atop the conning tower. The submersible startled rapidly settling down into the sea. They opened the scuttling cocks, Sam realized. He swore, but halfheartedly. In their place, he would have done the same thing.

“Watching them will be fun,” Cooley said. “We haven’t got a brig. Even if we did, it wouldn’t hold that many.”

“We’ll keep them up on deck, where the machine guns will bear,” Sam answered. “I don’t see how we can make our cruise with them along, though. I’ll wireless for instructions.”

As soon as the prisoners were aboard, he doused the searchlight. The pharmacist’s mate did what he could for the wounded. Sam went down to the deck and called for the enemy skipper. “Here I am, sir,” a glum-sounding man said. “Lieutenant Reed Talcott, at your service. I don’t thank you for wrecking us, but I do for picking us up.” He tipped a greasy cap he’d somehow kept on his head.

“Part of the game, Lieutenant,” Sam said, and gave his own name. “If it makes you feel any better, I’ve been sunk, too.”

“Not one damn bit,” Talcott said promptly.

Sam laughed. “All right. Can’t say as I blame you. We’ll put you somewhere out of the way, and then we’ll get on with the war.”

Not for the first time, Clarence Potter thought that Richmond and Philadelphia were both too close to the C.S.-U.S. border for comfort. When war came between the two countries-and it came, and came, and came-the capitals were appallingly vulnerable. They got more so as time went by, too: each side developed new and better-or was worse the right word? — ways to punish the other. For all practical purposes, the damnyankees had abandoned Washington as an administrative center. It just made too handy a target.

At the moment, though, Washington wasn’t the first thing on Potter’s mind. He stood behind a sawhorse in Capitol Square, one of at least a dozen that had red rope strung from them to form a perimeter. Signs hung from the rope: WARNING! UNEXPLODED BOMB! If that wasn’t enough to get the message across, the signs also displayed the skull and crossbones.

Even so, a woman started to duck under the ropes to take a shortcut to the Capitol. “Get the hell out of there, lady!” a sergeant shouted at her. “You want to get your stupid ass blown off?”

“Well!” she sniffed. “Such language!”

The sergeant sighed and turned to Potter. “It ain’t like she hasn’t got enough ass so she couldn’t use some of it blown off,” he said. The Intelligence officer chuckled; indeed, the woman hadn’t missed any meals. The noncom, a member of the Bomb Disposal Unit, went on, “Jesus God, sir, you wouldn’t reckon people could be so stinking stupid, though, would you?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Potter said. “That kind of thing rarely surprises me. A lot of people are damn fools, and there’s not much you can do about it, except maybe try to keep them from killing themselves.”

“Ugly bitch wouldn’t have been that much of a loss.” The sergeant sighed again. “Still and all, I expect you’re right. I just wish the Yankees were damn fools.”

Potter pointed toward the hole in the ground where the sergeant’s colleagues were working. “If they made better ordnance, that would have gone off,” he said, though he knew Confederate munitions factories turned out their fair share of duds, too.

But the sergeant shook his head. “It ain’t necessarily so, sir. Some of these fuckers-uh, excuse me-”

“I’ve heard the word before,” Potter said dryly. “I’ve even used the word before.”

“Oh.” The sergeant eyed the wreathed stars on either side of his collar. “I guess maybe. Anyways, though, like I was saying, some of ’em have time fuses, so they go boom when people aren’t expecting ’em. You’ll have heard about that, won’t you?”

“I sure have,” Potter said. “So you have to get them out of there before they go off. I’d be lying if I said I envied you.”

“Sometimes we get ’em out. Sometimes we have to defuse ’em where they’re at,” the BDU sergeant said. “And that’s what I meant when I said I wished the damnyankees were fools. Some of their time fuses’re just time fuses. Then we race the clock, like. Some of ’em, though, some of ’em are booby-trapped, so they’ll go off when we start messing with the time fuse. They’ll put those on ordinary bombs, too, so they’ll explode if you tinker. Sons of bitches want to kill us off, see, so then more of their time bombs’ll work.”

“That’s… unpleasant,” Potter said. “How do you handle those?”

“Carefully,” the sergeant answered.

Potter laughed, not that the younger man was kidding. Here was a glimpse of a cat-and-mouse game he hadn’t imagined before. Of course the Yankees wanted to blow up the people who got rid of unexploded bombs. It made perfect military sense-but it was hard on the men of the BDU. He asked, “Do we do the same thing to them?”

“Beats me, sir,” the noncom said, “but if we don’t, we’re missing a hell of a chance.”

“All right. That’s fair enough-no reason to expect you to know,” Potter said. He could find out for himself-or maybe he couldn’t, depending on how tight security was. Discovering the answer to that might be interesting all by itself.

“Hey, Cochrane!” somebody bawled from the direction of the hole in the ground. “Give me a hand setting up the clockstopper. We’re going to need it on this son of a bitch.”

“The clockstopper?” Potter said, intrigued.

“Sir, I can’t talk about that,” the sergeant-presumably Cochrane-said. “Security-you know how it is. And now, if you’ll excuse me…” He sketched a salute and hurried away.

No bomb burst shattered the calm of Richmond in the next half hour, so Potter supposed the clockstopper and whatever other arcane tools the Bomb Disposal Unit brought to bear on the bomb did what they were supposed to do. The war spawned every kind of specialist, not all of whom operated with as many eyes upon them as did the men of the BDU.

After Potter went back to the War Department, he remarked on what he’d seen to Nathan Bedford Forrest III. He couldn’t very well breach security with the head of the General Staff; if Forrest didn’t have the right to know everything there was to know, nobody in the CSA did. (Given the way things were in the Confederacy these days, quite possibly no one but Jake Featherston did. Potter preferred not to dwell on that.).

As things turned out, he didn’t have to dwell on it, because General Forrest knew enough to satisfy his curiosity. Nodding, Forrest said, “The BDU men are some of the best we have. Every one of them is a volunteer, too.”

Potter couldn’t look out on Richmond from Forrest’s office, which had plywood in place of window glass. Before long, window glass here in the capital might grow as extinct as the passenger pigeon. Of course, the same was no doubt just as true in Philadelphia. After pausing to light a cigarette, the Intelligence officer said, “I hadn’t thought about it, but I’m not surprised. You wouldn’t want somebody who didn’t want to be there messing with those bombs.”

“That’s what everybody thinks,” Forrest agreed. “Let me steal one of those from you.” Potter gave him a smoke. He tapped it on his desk a couple of times to settle the tobacco, then stuck it in his mouth. Potter lit a match for him and held it out. “Thanks,” Forrest said. He took a drag, blew out a plume of smoke, and looked up at the ceiling. “A lot of men volunteer for the duty.”

“Good,” Potter said. “I’d worry if they didn’t.”

“Yes, yes.” Forrest sounded impatient. “When you put it that way, so would I. But do you know how long the average service career of a BDU man is?”

“No, sir,” Potter admitted. “I don’t have the faintest idea.”

“Two and a half months-I saw the number just the other day, so it’s fresh in my mind,” Forrest said. “We need a lot of volunteers. By the way, we don’t talk about that number to BDU personnel, not under any circumstances.”

“I believe it.” Potter also believed that BDU men could probably figure it out for themselves, or at least come close. They all had to be mourning friends and comrades. Two and a half months… That was worse than he would have guessed. “Nos morituri te salutamus,” he murmured.

Nathan Bedford Forrest III nodded. “The only good thing you can say about the business is that, if something goes wrong, it’s all over before the poor bastards know it. The bombs go off faster than the nervous system can react.”

“That does matter,” Potter said. He hadn’t been at the front in the last war, but he’d been close enough to have seen horrors aplenty. Dreadfully wounded men, as far as he was concerned, were worse horrors than the dead. No matter how gruesome a corpse was, it was beyond suffering. For the living, pain went on and on.

The telephone rang. “Forrest here,” Forrest said. Potter left. He didn’t wait for Forrest to wave him out because he lacked clearance to hear whatever the chief of the General Staff was talking about. Disappearing without being asked in such circumstances was part of the etiquette of the security-conscious.

Potter’s own above-ground office, to which he’d defiantly returned, also had plywood in place of glass. Glass, these days, was not only a luxury but a dangerous luxury. In a bomb burst, shards were so many flying knives. They could chop a man into hamburger in the blink of an eye. Potter knew that. He missed being able to see out even so.

One thing-since he couldn’t look out the window, he couldn’t use looking out the window as an excuse for daydreaming. He had to buckle down and tackle the work on his desk. And so, reluctantly, he did.

On top of the pile was an urgent request from the Mormons of Deseret for whatever the Confederacy could send them. Getting supplies to them was harder than it had been when the rebellion first broke out. The U.S. noose was tightening. Potter had known it would. In a way, encouraging and helping the Mormon uprising seemed dreadfully unfair. Those people had not a chance in the world of winning, but they were eager to try, eager to the point of madness. It was enough to make a man with a conscience feel guilty.

Of course, a man with that kind of conscience had no business getting into Intelligence in the first place. Potter knew as much. He also knew his damnyankee counterparts were doing everything they could to arm the Negro terrorists in the CSA. If turnabout wasn’t fair play, what was? The only thing he really felt bad about was that there were so many more Negroes in the Confederate States than Mormons in the United States. Blacks caused more trouble for his side than the religious maniacs did for the enemy.

He wondered whether some Confederate operative had suggested auto bombs to the Mormons or they’d come up with them on their own. Either way, they made a viciously effective weapon for the weak against the strong. Again, Negroes in the CSA had proved that-and continued to prove it whenever they got the chance.

We need to keep this uprising alive as long as we can, he wrote. Where else can we tie down so many U.S. soldiers at so little cost to ourselves?

Even though the question was rhetorical as he wrote it, he knew it did have a possible answer. If Canada flared into rebellion, the Yankees would need endless divisions to hold it down. But, despite assiduous efforts, the Confederates hadn’t made a lot of friends up there. To Canadians, they might as well have been Yankees themselves. That infuriated Clarence Potter-and every other Confederate who’d ever run into the problem-but fury didn’t do much good.

If any outsiders could make the Canadians rise up, the Confederates weren’t the ones. The British were. Potter paused thoughtfully. Winston Churchill was supposed to favor quixotic schemes like that-and keeping the USA busy was as much in Britain’s interest as it was in the CSA’s.

A memorandum from Potter would never reach the British Prime Minister. A memorandum from Jake Featherston, on the other hand… Potter nodded to himself. Churchill might not agree. That was the chance you took. But he wouldn’t be able to ignore the request from an allied head of state. And Featherston would look at a memorandum from Potter. The Intelligence officer paused for a moment to gather his thoughts, then began to write.

Jake Featherston often felt busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. He sometimes thought he wouldn’t have wanted to become President if he’d known ahead of time how much work the job was. That wasn’t true-down deep in his heart, he knew as much-but it gave him something to complain about.

Take paperwork. He’d never known what an obscene word that could be till he came to the Gray House. No matter how much he gave to other people, he still had plenty and then some. Paperwork was the price he paid for being boss.

Every once in a while, he ran into something he really needed to see. When he came to a memorandum from Clarence Potter, he knew he had to read it. For one thing, Potter would give him a hard time if he didn’t. And, for another, even though he trusted the Intelligence officer about as far as he could throw him, Potter had a lefthanded way of looking at the world that was often valuable. By his own lights, Potter was a patriot. Where his lights and Jake’s corresponded, they got on fine.

As Featherston read through this scheme, he found himself nodding. “Yeah,” he said when he was done. “About time we got some help from our so-called allies.” He knew as well as anybody that Britain was heavily bogged down in western Germany, trying to hold on to the gains she and France had made when the war was shiny and new. He recognized the feeling. He had it himself. The problem with grabbing a tiger by the tail was that letting go could hurt even worse than hanging on.

He picked up a pen and started to write. If Churchill wanted to play along, this wouldn’t cost the limeys much-and if it went off well, it could bring the United States untold grief. That wouldn’t break Jake’s heart. Oh, no-far from it.

His big worry was that Churchill was too obsessed with the Kaiser to care what happened on this side of the Atlantic. But the USA was the country that had taken Canada and Newfoundland away from England after the Great War. Winston was almost as good at remembering offenses done him as Jake was himself.

“Lulu!” he called from his office.

“What is it, Mr. President?” his secretary asked.

“I want Major Hamilton right away.”

Major Ira Hamilton hurried into the President’s underground office inside of five minutes. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said. He was tall, thin, and bespectacled; he looked much more like a math teacher than a major.

“Good. Good.” Jake thrust the paper at him. “I need you to put this into our fanciest code and send it to London just as fast as you can.” There was a reason Hamilton looked like a math teacher: up till the war started, he’d been a professor of mathematics at Washington University.

“I’ll do it, sir,” he said. “It doesn’t look too long-it should go out this afternoon.”

“That’ll be just fine, Major. Thank you kindly.” Featherston was far more polite with people who were useful to him than with the rest of the world. Hamilton gave him a ragged salute and hurried away. Someone would keep a discreet eye on the unmilitary major to make sure he did what he was supposed to do and nothing else. And someone would watch the man who watched Hamilton, and somebody would…

Things had to work that way. If you didn’t keep an eye on people, they’d make you wish you had. Jake even kept an eye on Don Partridge. He’d chosen his Vice President because Partridge was the mildest, safest, most inoffensive, and most useless man he could find-and he kept an eye on him anyway. You couldn’t be too careful.

Some of the papers Featherston plowed through were damage reports from the western part of the Confederacy. The damnyankees were trying to knock out the dams he’d built on the Tennessee and the Cumberland Rivers. That infuriated him. It alarmed him, too. The Confederate States needed the electricity those dams produced. It kept factories going. And it changed millions of people’s lives. He was as proud of those dams and what they did as of almost anything else his administration had accomplished.

Almost was the key word there. Ferd Koenig came in a couple of hours later. “Good to see you, by God,” Jake said. “Have a seat.” He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of fine Tennessee sipping whiskey. “Have a snort.”

“Don’t mind if I do.” Koenig took the bottle from him, raised it, swallowed, and passed it back. “Virgin’s milk. The corn that went in there died happy.”

“You better believe it.” Jake swigged, too. Velvet fire ran down his throat. He set the bottle on the desk after one knock. He wanted the taste. He didn’t want to get smashed. “So how’s relocation coming?”

“Tolerable. Better than tolerable, matter of fact,” Koenig answered. “One neighborhood at a time, one town at a time, we clean ’em out. Off they go. They reckon they’re going to camps, and they are. What they don’t reckon on is, they don’t come out again.”

“Towns are all very well. Towns are better than all very well, matter of fact,” Jake said. “But there’s still the core of the cotton country-from South Carolina through Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi into Louisiana. We thinned that out some when we brought in harvesters-got a bunch of niggers off the farms and into towns where we could deal with ’em easier.”

“Got a bunch of ’em with rifles in their hands, too,” Ferdinand Koenig said dryly. “They didn’t have work anymore, so they reckoned they might as well go out and start shooting white folks.”

He wasn’t wrong, but Featherston said, “We had trouble with ’em before that, too,” which was also true. He went on, “That whole goddamn Black Belt’s been up in arms ever since the Great War. Damn Whigs never were able to put it down all the way, and we’ve had our own fun and games with it. Plenty of places down there where it’s never been safe for a white man to go around by himself in broad daylight, let alone after the sun goes down.”

“That’s only part of the problem,” Koenig said. “In towns, you can put barbed wire around the nigger district, and after that you can go in and clean it out one chunk at a time, however you want to. The niggers in the countryside, you can’t cordon ’em off so easy. They just slip away. It’s like trying to scoop up water with a sieve.”

“Gotta keep working on it,” Jake said.

The Attorney General’s jowls wobbled as he nodded. “Oh, hell, I know that,” he said. “But the real trouble is, it takes a lot of manpower, and we haven’t got a lot of people to spare, not the way things are going.”

“I know, I know.” Featherston reached for the whiskey bottle again. More heat trickled down his throat. He’d been so certain he could knock the USA out of the war in a hurry. He’d been so certain-and he’d been so wrong. Soldiers at the front were more important than anything else, even people to help round up the niggers. After yet another swig, he added, “Those trucks that Pinkard came up with can’t handle all the volume we need for this operation, either.”

“They’re the best we’ve got,” Koenig said. “And we don’t have guards eating their guns all the goddamn time anymore, either, the way we did before we started using them.”

“I know that, too, dammit,” Jake said impatiently. “We need something better, though-and no, I don’t know what it is any more than you do. But something. We’ve got to get rid of those niggers in great big old lots.”

“You can figure out damn near anything if you throw enough money and enough smart people at it,” Ferd Koenig observed. “Is this worth throwing ’em at it? Or do we need the people and the money more somewhere else?”

“This is what we spent all that time wandering in the wilderness for,” Jake said, as if he were Moses leading the CSA to the Promised Land. That was exactly how he felt, too. “If we don’t do this, we’re letting the country down.”

“Well, all right.” Koenig nodded again. “I feel the same way, but I needed to make sure you did. We can do that-you know we can. But it’ll likely mean pulling those people and that money away from the war effort.”

“This is the war effort,” Jake Featherston declared. “What else would you call it? This is what counts.” Even as he spoke, he heard the rumble of U.S. artillery fire, not nearly far enough to the north. He nodded anyway. “We clean out the coons, we’ll do something for this country that’ll last till the end of time.”

“All right, then. We’ll tend to it.” Koenig sighed. “I wish we had as many people as the Yankees do. They can afford to keep more balls in the air at the same time than we can.”

“I don’t care about their balls in the air. Those aren’t the ones I aim to kick,” Jake said.

“Heh,” Ferd Koenig said. “Well, I hope we can do it, that’s all.” He was listening to the gunfire from the north, too. He didn’t brush it aside the way Jake did. It worried him, and he made no secret about that, not even to Featherston.

Showing what he thought took nerve. Lesser men had ended up in camps for lesser offenses. But regardless of whether Koenig agreed with Jake’s policies, his personal loyalty was unshakable. Jake could count the people he fully trusted on his fingers-sometimes, on a bad day, on his thumbs-but Ferd always had been, was, and always would be one of them.

“We will.” Featherston retained his conviction in his own destiny. “The show will be starting soon, and we’ll squash ’em flat. You’ll see.”

“Expect I will.” Koenig didn’t say one way or the other. He didn’t even leave it hanging in the air. He believed in Jake’s destiny, too. He’d gone on believing in it through the black years in the middle twenties, when so many others wrote Jake and the Freedom Party off. He asked, “You need me for anything else?”

“Don’t think so,” Jake answered. “But we do need some kind of way to get rid of more niggers faster. You put some bright boys on that and see what they can come up with.”

“Right.” Ferdinand Koenig heaved himself out of his chair and headed for the door. Jake had no idea what he would come up with or even if he would come up with anything, but had no doubt he would look, and look hard. If you looked hard enough, you generally found something.

Muttering, Jake went back to looking through his paperwork. He wished he thought he would find anything else important, or even something interesting, in there. “Fat chance,” he muttered. “Fat fucking chance.” He made sure he kept his voice down; Lulu didn’t like to hear him swear. That didn’t always stop him, but it did a good part of the time.

And then he turned up a report from an outfit called the Huntsville Rocket Society. He wondered how the hell anything that bizarre had made it onto his desk. Then he saw why. The brigadier general in charge of air defense of Alabama and Mississippi endorsed it, writing, However startling these claims sound, I believe they can be made real soon enough to prove useful in the present conflict.

">That made Jake read it more carefully than he would have otherwise. “Son of a bitch,” he murmured halfway through. “Son of a bitch. Wouldn’t that be something if they could?”