In At the Death

XII

D id taking your own airplanes with you mean a flotilla could operate close to enemy-held land? It hadn't at the start of the war, as Sam Carsten remembered too well. Land-based C.S. airplanes badly damaged the Remembrance when her bombers struck at Charleston.

Well, all kinds of things had changed since then. Charleston was no more-one bomb from a (land-based) airplane had seen to that. And the fleet approaching Haiti had not one airplane carrier but half a dozen. Only one of those was a fleet carrier, newer and faster and able to carry more airplanes than the Remembrance had. The others were smaller, and three of them slower. Still, together they carried close to three hundred airplanes. If that thought wasn't enough to give the Confederate defenders on the western part of the island of Hispaniola nightmares, Sam didn't know what would be.

He had a few nightmares of his own. The Confederates still had airplanes on Haiti, in the Bahamas, and in Cuba. They had submersibles and torpedo boats. They had a sizable garrison to hold Haiti down and to keep the USA from using the Negro nation as a base against them in the Caribbean. They had…

"Sir, they have troubles, lots of them," Lon Menefee said when Sam flabbled out loud. "All those colored folks on these islands hate Jake Featherston like rat poison. Why, Cuba-"

"I know about Cuba," Sam broke in. "The Josephus Daniels ran guns in there a couple of years ago, to give the rebels a hand."

"Well, there you go, then." The new exec damn near dripped confidence. "Besides, they may have airplanes, but have they got fuel? We've been pounding their dumps and hitting the shipping from the mainland. We can do this. I honest to God think we can, sir."

"Hey, here's hoping you're right," Carsten said. It wasn't just that Menefee was a kid, because he was plenty old enough to have served through the whole war. But he wasn't the Old Man. The Josephus Daniels was Sam's responsibility. If anything went wrong, the blame landed squarely on him. Command made you the loneliest, most worried man in the world-or at least on your ship. The poor son of a bitch in charge of the destroyer half a mile away knew what you were going through, though. So did the sub skipper who was trying to send you to the bottom.

Bombers and covering fighters roared off the carriers' flight decks. Squadron after squadron buzzed off toward the southwest, toward Cap-Haпtien and Port-au-Prince. More fighters flew combat air patrol above the fleet.

Battleships' guns roared. The battlewagons didn't rule the fleet the way they had when Sam enlisted back before the Great War started. But their big guns still reached far enough and packed enough punch to make them great for shore bombardment.

Sam's gaze went forward, to one of the Josephus Daniels' pair of four-inch guns. His smile was fond but wry. That gun could shoot at enemy aircraft from longer range than the twin 40mms that had sprouted like mushrooms everywhere there was free space on the deck. For shore bombardment…Well, you'd better be hitting some place where the bad guys couldn't hit back.

Slow, squat, ungainly landing craft surged forward. The troops on them were going to take Haiti away from the Confederate States. If everything went right they were, anyhow. If the operation went south, every skipper in the fleet and every brass hat up to and including the Secretary of the Navy would testify under oath before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.

"Anything?" Sam asked Thad Walters.

The Y-ranging officer shook his head. "I've got our aircraft on the screen, sir, but I'm not picking up any bandits."

"I'll be damned." Sam glanced over to Lon Menefee. "Maybe you're right. Maybe the butternut bastards are further gone than I thought."

"Sure hope so," Menefee said. "Tell you one thing: when the Marines and the Army guys go ashore, their venereal rate's gonna climb like one of those fighters. Lots of infected people in Haiti, and the gals there'll be mighty glad to see 'em."

"Well, with the spiffy new pills and shots we've got, it's not as bad as it used to be. Still not good," Sam added hastily-you couldn't sound complacent about VD. The idea of lying down with a colored woman didn't drive him wild. But if you were a horny kid and there were no white gals for three islands around, you'd take whatever you could get. He remembered some of his own visits to brothels full of Chinese girls in Honolulu during the last war.

A yeoman came up onto the bridge. "Carriers report airplanes heading our way from Cuba, sir."

"Thanks, van Duyk," Sam said. Carriers had stronger Y-ranging sets than his ship did.

The men already stood at battle stations. Sam passed the word that the enemy was on the way. After he stepped back from the PA microphone, Lon Menefee said, "Well, we're not first on their list, anyhow."

He was bound to be right about that. The Confederates would want to hit airplane carriers and battlewagons and, he supposed, landing craft before they bothered with a lowly destroyer escort. All the same, Sam said, "If we end up on their plate, they won't send us back to the kitchen. And we don't want to get loose and sloppy, either."

"You've got that straight, sir," Menefee said at once.

"That's what she said," Sam answered, and the exec snorted. Overhead, some of the fighters from the CAP streaked off toward the west. Was that a good idea? If more enemy aircraft came at the fleet from another direction, from the Bahamas or from Haiti itself, they might catch the ships with their pants down.

These days, battles mostly happened out of sight of one side's fleet or the other's. This one might start out of sight of both. And that record would be hard to top, unless one of these days you got a fight something like the Battle of the Three Navies back in Great War days.

"I have bandits on the screen, sir," Lieutenant Walters reported. "Bearing 250, approaching…well, pretty fast. Looks like they're about ten minutes out. Our boys are on 'em."

"Thanks, Thad," Sam said, and passed the word to the crew. Then he asked, "Any sign of bandits from some different direction?"

Walters checked his screens before answering, "No, sir."

Sam grunted. That sounded more like what he'd hoped than what he'd expected. Echoing his thoughts, Lon Menefee said, "The Confederates really must be at the end of their tether."

"Well, maybe they are. Who woulda thunk it?" Sam called down a speaking tube to the hydrophone station in the bowels of the ship: "Hear anything, Bevacqua?"

"Not a thing, sir," the CPO replied. "Nothin' but our screw and the ones from the rest of the fleet. Jack diddly from the pings when I send 'em out."

"All right. Thanks. Sing out if you do, remember."

"Better believe it, sir," Bevacqua said. "It's my ass, too, you know."

Hearing that float out of the speaking tube, Menefee raised an eyebrow. It didn't faze Sam a bit. "Is he wrong?" he asked. The exec shook his head.

Another destroyer escort off to the west started firing. A moment later, so did the Josephus Daniels. "They're going after the carriers," Sam said, watching the Confederate airplanes.

"Wouldn't you?" Menefee asked.

"Maybe. But if I could tear up the landing craft, I might want to do that first. This is about Haiti, after all," Sam said. If it was about the island any more. For all he knew, it might have been about hurting the United States as much as the Confederacy could, and nothing more than that. On such a scale, carriers were likely to count more than landing boats.

But not many C.S. airplanes came overhead. Sam didn't know how many had set out from Cuba, but he would have bet a lot of them never made it this far. The CAP was doing its job.

The yeoman hurried back up to the bridge. "Our men are ashore, sir," he said. Sam sent the news out over the loudspeakers. The crew cheered and whooped. Van Duyk didn't go away. "There's more news, sir," he added in quieter tones.

"What's up?" Apprehension gusted along Sam's spine.

"Hamburg's gone, sir," van Duyk answered. "One of those bombs."

"Jesus!" Sam said. Churchill hadn't been kidding, then. England had caught up with the Germans, or at least come close enough to wreck a city. "What does the Kaiser say?"

"Nothing yet, sir," van Duyk said. "But I sure wouldn't want to be living in London right now."

"Me, neither," Sam agreed. "Or anywhere else a German bomber could get to." Or a British bomber…Did the limeys have aircraft that could lug what had to be a heavy bomb across the Atlantic to New York City? Did they have bombers that could fly across the Atlantic almost empty and pick up their superbombs in the CSA? That would be easier-if the Confederates had any new superbombs to pick up. All kinds of unpleasant possibilities…

And he couldn't do a goddamn thing about any of them. All he could do was clap his hands when the forward four-inch gun turned a C.S. bomber into a smear of smoke and flame in the sky.

Abruptly, it was over, at least around the Josephus Daniels. He couldn't spot any more Confederate airplanes above the ship. The gunners went on shooting awhile longer. They didn't believe in taking chances.

"Boy," Lon Menefee said. "I hope the guys going ashore have as easy a time as we did."

"Yeah, me, too," Sam said. "You would've thought the Confederates could throw more at us."

"A year ago, they could have," the exec said. "Two years ago, they were throwing the goddamn kitchen sink."

Carsten nodded. For the first year of the war, things had looked mighty black. Pittsburgh said the CSA wouldn't be able to conquer the USA. Till then, even that was up in the air. If the Confederates had taken it and gone on toward Philadelphia-But they hadn't. They couldn't. And afterwards it became clear they'd thrown too much into that attack, and didn't have enough left to defend with.

That was afterwards, though. At the time, no one had any idea whether they would fall short. What looked inevitable after the fact often seemed anything but while shells were flying and people were dying. By how much did the Confederates fall short in Pittsburgh? Sam didn't know, and he wasn't sure anyone else did. All the same, he would have bet the answer was on the order of only a little bit.

Lon Menefee's thoughts ran in a different direction: "Wonder how many smokes our guys'll find alive on Haiti."

"Hadn't worried about that." Sam bared his teeth in what was anything but a smile. "They would've had guns-they were a country before the butternut bastards jumped on 'em. I hope they gave Featherston's fuckers a good big dose of trouble." No, he didn't particularly love Negroes, but he didn't want to see them dead, either-especially if they were making the Confederates sweat.

C assius hadn't thought patrolling Madison, Georgia, and keeping white folks in line could get dull, but it did. Anything you did over and over got dull. Well, he didn't suppose screwing would, but he hadn't done enough of that to count as "over and over." A few hasty grapples with women who'd been part of Gracchus' band at one time or another were the sum of his experience.

He knew just enough to know he wanted to know more.

And he knew enough to be worried about whether he'd ever get the chance for it. One muggy evening at supper, he asked Gracchus, "Where we gonna find us some nice gals to marry?"

The guerrilla chief looked down at his mess kit, as if hoping one would turn up there. But he had the same roasted pork ribs and sweet potatoes and green beans as Cassius-only those, and nothing more. "Beats me. Beats the shit outa me," he said heavily. "Most of the niggers left alive down here is the ones in the bands. Ain't a hell of a lot of gals who wanted to pick up a Tredegar."

"Don't I know it! Sometimes I gets so horny, can't hardly stand it," Cassius said. "Plenty of white women left with no husbands on account of the war…"

"Good fuckin' luck! Good fuckin' luck!" Gracchus said. "Yeah, plenty o' white widows. An' you know what else? They's sorry their husbands is dead. An' they's even sorrier we ain't."

Cassius wished he thought the older man were wrong. Unfortunately, he didn't. A shortage of black women and a shortage of white men should have had an obvious solution. Before the war, during the war, saying that where any white could hear him would have got him a one-way ticket to the graveyard. Would things be any different once the CSA finally threw in the sponge? Fat chance, he thought.

"Be a few gals don't care what color man they got, long as they got one," Gracchus predicted. "A few-the ones who git horny the same way a guy does. But even supposin' you find one, where you gonna set up housekeepin' wid her? Any place you try, how long 'fore the neighbors burn your house down, likely with the both of you in it?"

"The Yankees-" Cassius began.

Gracchus shook his head. "Yankees can't be everywhere. 'Sides, most of 'em don't want us messin' wid no white women, neither. They kin use us, yeah. But they ain't gonna stick their necks out fo' us when they don't got to, and you kin bet your ass on dat. Hell, you mess wid a white woman, you is bettin' your sorry ass on dat."

"Shit," Cassius said, again not because he thought Gracchus was wrong but because he didn't. "Maybe we go up to the USA, then. Got to be some colored gals there who'd give us the time o' day."

"Might not be too bad, if the Yankees let us," Gracchus allowed. "But we ain't U.S. citizens any more'n we's Confederate citizens. We don't belong nowhere. You don't believe me, go ask a white man."

Once more, he made more sense than Cassius wished he did. Every time you tried to get around what Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party had done to Negroes in the Confederate States, you banged your head into a stone wall instead.

The next morning, a couple of Confederate privates and a corporal came up to Cassius as he was on patrol. None of them was carrying a weapon. When they saw him, they all raised their hands and stood very still. "Don't shoot, pal," the corporal said. "We're just lookin' for somebody to surrender to, that's all. Reckon you're it."

Had they worn the camouflage of the Freedom Party Guards, Cassius would have been tempted to plug them no matter how they tried to sweet-talk him. Who could guess what guards were doing when they weren't fighting the Yankees? Cassius could, for one. Maybe they were closing Negroes up behind barbed wire. Or maybe they were shoving them into the hell-bound trains from which nobody came back. It wasn't by accident that Freedom Party Guards had a tough time giving themselves up to the U.S. Army's new black auxiliaries.

But these three were just in ordinary butternut. If they'd gone out of the way to give Negroes a hard time, it didn't show. And the noncom hadn't been dumb enough to call Cassius boy. He gestured with his rifle. "Y'all come with me. POW camp's right outside of town. You don't give nobody trouble, you'll be all right."

"Had enough trouble," the corporal said, and both privates nodded. The two-striper went on, "Me, I got a Purple Heart and two oak-leaf clusters. One more wound and I'm a goddamn colander. Enough is enough. Damnyankees wouldn't be here in the middle of Georgia if we weren't licked."

"Damn right." If the Yankees weren't here, Cassius probably wouldn't have been, either. Sooner or later, the militias and the Mexicans would have squashed Gracchus' band. "Get movin'. Keep your hands high, and don't git close enough to make me jumpy, or you be mighty sorry."

"You got the piece," the corporal said. "You call the shots."

As they tramped through Madison, the other two soldiers opened up a little. One was from Mississippi, the other from Arkansas. They'd had enough of the war; they were heading home. Cassius thought they were nuts to try to get through two states full of U.S. soldiers, but they weren't the first men to tell him a story like that. As Confederate armies came apart at the seams, as men thought of themselves ahead of their country once more, the whole thrashing corpse of the CSA seemed full of people in uniform on the move. Some were trying to get somewhere, like these. Others were trying to get away either from Confederates who didn't want them deserting or from U.S. soldiers who had reason to want to catch them.

"Never reckoned we'd get whupped," the corporal said mournfully. "First time I got shot was in Ohio. Second time was in Pennsylvania. Third time was in Tennessee, just outside of Chattanooga. Things weren't going so good by then."

"I suppose I can see how you'd say that," Cassius allowed. "But if you was a colored fella here in Georgia, things never went good. Ain't many of us left alive."

"We were up at the front, fighting the damnyankees. We didn't know nothin' about none o' that," the private from Arkansas said quickly. Too quickly? Cassius wasn't sure. He did know the U.S. guards at the POW camp questioned new prisoners about what they'd done before they got caught. Every so often, they arrested somebody and took him away for more grilling.

"Nabbed yourself some more of these sorry sacks of shit, did you?" a U.S. sergeant in Madison called to Cassius, and gave him a thumbs-up. Cassius waved back.

"He's got no cause to call us that," the C.S. corporal said. "I wouldn't call him that if I went and captured him-and I got me a few damnyankees during the war."

The private from Mississippi nodded. "You didn't cuss us when you caught us," he said to Cassius. "Your mama must've learned you manners."

"She did." Cassius' eyes suddenly stung. "And then you goddamn ofays went an' shipped her to a camp, an' my pa, an' my sis, too, an' I reckon they's all dead now."

None of the Confederate soldiers said much after that, which was smart of them. And yet the Mississippian had a point of sorts. Cassius hadn't cursed the Confederates when they gave themselves up to them. Some of that was because swear words weren't enough to let him tell them what he thought of them. But some of it was because Confederate whites and Confederate blacks understood one another in ways U.S. whites never would. They might not like one another-hell, they might and often did hate one another. But they and their ancestors had mostly lived side by side for hundreds of years. Each knew how the other ticked.

"Score three for the good guys!" a guard outside the POW compound called as Cassius brought the captives up to the entrance.

"I leave these fellas with you?" Cassius asked.

"Yeah, I'll take care of 'em from here on out," the guard replied. He carried a submachine gun, a heavy U.S. Thompson. It would do the job if it had to. "C'mon, you lugs," he told the Confederates. "This is the end of the line for you."

"I don't mind," the corporal said. "Like I told this fella here"-he nodded toward Cassius-"I already been shot three different times. I'm still here. I'm still walkin'. One more, maybe my luck woulda run out."

"Damn war's over with," one of the privates added. "We lost. Ain't much point to fighting any more."

"You guys aren't so dumb," the U.S. soldier said. "Kick you in the teeth often enough and you get the idea." He led them off into captivity. They didn't seem the least bit sorry to go. They'd managed to give up without getting killed. And the chow inside the barbed wire was bound to be better than what they'd scrounged on their own. How much food the Yankees took for granted had already astonished Cassius. The men in butternut were scrawny enough to make him sure it would amaze them, too.

Cassius went back on patrol. Unlike the POWs, he had to earn his victuals. And damned if another pair of Confederate soldiers didn't come into Madison an hour and a half later. They'd also made sure they weren't carrying weapons before they showed themselves.

Seeing Cassius-and seeing his rifle-they wasted no time raising their hands. "We ain't people bombs or nothin', Rastus," one of them said. "Cross my heart we ain't." He lowered his right hand for a moment to make the gesture.

"My name ain't Rastus," Cassius retorted. But, again, as long as they didn't wear camouflage or call him nigger or boy, he was willing if not precisely eager to let them give up.

The same soldier in green-gray still stood at the entrance to the POW camp when Cassius brought in his next set of captives. "Son of a bitch!" the Yankee said. "You're turning into a one-man gang!"

"They know they's licked," Cassius said. "Don't bother 'em to give up now, like maybe it did befo'."

"That's about the size of it," one of the Confederates agreed. "What's the point to gettin' shot now? Sure ain't gonna change how things turn out."

"You got that right, anyway," the U.S. soldier said. "Well, come on. We'll get you your rooms at our hotel, all right. You can have the caviar or the pheasant under glass. The barmaid'll be along with the champagne in a few minutes, but it costs extra if you want her to blow you."

Both men in butternut stared. So did Cassius; the Yankee's deadpan delivery was mighty convincing. Then the Confederates started to laugh. One of them said, "Long as I don't get blown up, that's all I care about right now."

"Amen!" said the other new POW, as if responding to a preacher in church.

On that kind of simple level, Cassius had no trouble understanding and sympathizing with them. When he tried to fathom their cause, though…If they had their way, I'd be dead, same as the rest of my family. How can they want that so bad? I never done nothin' to them.

They didn't care. They feared Negroes might do something to them, and so they got in the first lick. That was Jake Featherston all the way-hit first, and hit hard. But he hadn't hit the United States quite hard enough. He got in the first lick, but they were getting the last one. And I'm still here, too, Cassius thought. You may not like it, you ofay asshole, but I damn well am.

S itting in the Humble jail was a humbling experience for Jeff Pinkard. Even if the Republic of Texas had seceded from the Confederate States, the guards at the jail were all U.S. military policemen. They wore green-gray uniforms, white gloves, and white helmets with MP on them in big letters. They reminded him of a lot of the men who'd guarded Camp Humble and the other camps he'd run: they were tough and brave and not especially smart.

They wouldn't let his wife or stepsons in to see him. They wouldn't let him see his new baby. All he had for company was Vern Green; the guard chief moped in the cell across the hall.

Three hulking U.S. MPs came for Jeff early in the morning. They all carried big, heavy U.S. submachine guns. "Come on, Pinkard," one of them-a sergeant-said, his voice cold as Russian Alaska.

Jeff thought they were going to take him outside and shoot him. Who was there to stop them? Not a soul. He fought to keep a wobble out of his voice when he said, "I want to talk to a lawyer."

"Yeah? So did all the coons you smoked. Come on, asshole," the MP said. One of his buddies unlocked the cell door. Jeff came. Fear made his legs light. All he could do was try not to show it. If you were going to die anyway, you wanted to die as well as you could.

He squinted against the sun when they led him out of the jail. He hadn't seen so much sunshine since they locked him up. Looking back at the jail building, he saw the U.S. and Texas flags flying side by side above it. His mouth tightened. Both those flags reminded him of the Stars and Bars; both, now, were arrayed against it.

Barbed wire and machine-gun nests and armored cars defended the jail and the buildings close to it. Seeing Jeff glance at the new fortifications, the MP sergeant said, "Nobody's gonna spring you from this place, so don't get your hopes up."

"Way you've got it set up, you must reckon an awful lot of folks want to," Jeff replied. The noncom scowled at him but didn't answer. Jeff smiled to himself-that shot must have got home.

What had been a bail bondsman's office down the street from the jail now had U.S. soldiers standing guard in front of it. The Lone Star flag might fly over the jail, but Pinkard didn't see any Texas Rangers. The damnyankees were running this show. He didn't think that was good news for him.

One of the guards opened the door. "Go on in," the MP sergeant said.

"What happens when I do?" Jeff asked suspiciously.

"The bogeyman gets you," the MP snapped. When Jeff neither panicked nor asked for any more explanation, the Yankee gestured impatiently. "Just go on. You wanted a lawyer. They're gonna give you one. More than you deserve, if anybody wants to know what I think."

Pinkard didn't give a rat's ass for what the MP thought. A lawyer was more than he'd thought he would get from the U.S. authorities. Of course, having one and having one who'd do any good were two different critters. He was playing by Yankee rules now, and he knew damn well they'd be stacked against him.

In he went, before the snooty sergeant could tell him again. Sitting at what had been the bondsman's desk was a skinny fellow with curly red hair, a big nose, and a U.S. major's gold oak leaves. "You're Jefferson Pinkard?" the man asked.

"That's right." Jeff nodded. "Who're you?"

"My name is Isidore Goldstein," the major answered. I figured he was a hebe, Jeff thought. Well, chances are he's smart, anyway. Goldstein went on, "I'm part of the Judge-Advocate's staff. I'm an attorney specializing in military law. I will defend you to the best of my ability."

"And how good are you?" Pinkard asked.

"Damn good, matter of fact," Goldstein said. "Let's get something straight right now: I didn't want this job. They gave it to me. Well, that's how it goes sometimes. I don't like you. No-I despise you. If you've done one percent of what they say you've done, I'd stand in the firing squad and aim at your chest. And we both know you've done a hell of a lot more than that."

"If you're my lawyer, why do they need some other asshole to prosecute me?" Jeff said.

He surprised a laugh out of Goldstein. The Yankee lawyer-the Yankee Jew lawyer, almost a stock figure in Confederate movies about the depravities of life in the USA-said, "But you gotta understand something else, too. My job is defending people. Guilty people need lawyers. Guilty people especially need lawyers. Whatever they let me do, I'll do. If I can get you off the hook, I will. If I can keep 'em from killing you, I will. That's what I'm supposed to do, and I'll damn well do it. And like I say, I know what I'm doing, too."

Pinkard believed him, not least because Goldstein plainly didn't care whether he believed him or not. "So what are my chances, then?"

"Shitty," Goldstein answered matter-of-factly. "They've got the goods on you. They know what you did. They can prove it. You get rid of that many people, it's not like you can keep it a secret."

"Everything I was doing, I was doing 'cause I got orders from Richmond to take care of it," Jeff said. "Far as the laws of my country went, it was all legal as could be. So what business of your country is it what I was doing inside of mine?"

"Well, that's one of the arguments I aim to use," Isidore Goldstein said. "You're not so dumb after all, are you?"

"Hope not," Jeff said. "How come you reckoned I was?"

"One way to do what you did is just do it and never think about it at all," the U.S. attorney said. "I figured you might be like that, where you'd go, 'Yeah, sure,' and take care of things, like. But you've got too many brains for that-I can tell. So why did you do it?"

"'Cause the niggers were screwing my country. Honest to God, they were. First time I went to combat in 1916, it wasn't against you Yankees. Oh, hell, no. I was fightin' the damn coons in Georgia after they rose up and stabbed us in the back."

Goldstein pulled a notebook out of his left breast pocket and wrote something in it. "Maybe that will help some. I don't know, but maybe," he said. "The charge, though, is crimes against humanity, and that can mean whatever the people who make it want it to mean."

"Sounds chickenshit to me," Jeff said. "They gonna make believe the niggers weren't up in arms against our government long before we went to war with the USA? They can do that-I sure can't stop 'em-but they're a pack of goddamn liars if they do."

The military attorney did some more scrawling. "Maybe you want to forget the word nigger."

"How come?" Pinkard asked, genuinely confused.

"Because you hammer another nail into your coffin every time you say it," Goldstein answered. "In the United States, it's an insult, a fighting word." The idea that Negroes could fight whites without having the whole country land on them with both feet deeply offended Jeff. He was shrewd enough to see saying so wouldn't do him any good. He just nodded instead. So did Isidore Goldstein, who went on, "And they'll say things were so bad for the colored population in the Confederate States under Freedom Party rule that it had no choice but to rebel."

"Well, they can can say any damn thing they want," Jeff replied. "Saying something doesn't make it so, though."

"'I'm Jake Featherston, and I'm here to tell you the truth,'" Goldstein quoted with savage relish. "Yes, we've noticed that."

"Oh, yeah. You damnyankees never once told a lie. And every one of you just loves coons, too. And I bet your shit don't stink, either."

"All of which would be good points except for two minor details." The lawyer ticked them off on his fingers: "First one is, the United States are going to win and the Confederate States are going to lose. Second one is, you really are responsible for upwards of a million deaths."

"So what?" Jeff said. That made even Goldstein blink. Angrily, Pinkard said it again: "So what, goddammit? Who gave the orders to drop those fucking superbombs on our cities? You think that asshole ain't a bigger criminal than me? You gonna hang him by the balls? Like hell you will! Chances are you'll pin a medal on the motherfucker instead."

"Again, two minor details," Goldstein said. "First, you used the superbomb before we did-"

"Yeah, and I wish we woulda started a year ago," Jeff broke in. "Then you'd be laughing out of the other side of your face."

Goldstein continued as if he hadn't spoken: "And, again, we're winning and you're not. You might do well to sound sorry for what you've done and to blame it on Featherston and on Ferdinand Koenig. I'm afraid I don't think it will do you much good, but it may do you some."

"You want me to turn traitor," Jeff said.

"I'm trying to tell you how you have some small chance of staying alive," Isidore Goldstein said. "If you don't care, I can't do much for you. I'm very much afraid I can't do much for you anyhow."

"I'll tell you what I'm sorry about. I'm sorry we lost," Pinkard said. "I'm sorry it comes down to me havin' to try and beg my life from a bunch of damnyankees. Seems like I got a choice between dyin' on my feet and maybe livin' on my knees. You had a choice like that, Mr. Smartass Lawyer, what would you do?"

"I don't know. How can any man know for sure before he has to find out the hard way?" Goldstein said. "But I'm still Jewish. That says I likely have some stubborn ancestors up in the branches of my family tree."

Jeff hadn't thought of it like that. He didn't exactly love Jews. But, like most Confederates, he aimed the greater portion of his scorn at Negroes and a big part of what was left at Mexicans. (He wondered what Hip Rodriguez would do in a mess like this. He didn't think Hip would crawl; greaser or not, Hip was a man. But why-why, dammit? — did he go and eat his gun?)

"There you are, then," Jeff said.

"Yeah, here I am. And here you are, and how the hell am I supposed to defend you?" Goldstein shook his head. "I'll give it my best shot. Better than you deserve, too. But then like I said, it's the guys who don't deserve a defense who deserve it most of all."

What was that supposed to mean? Jeff was still chewing on it when the U.S. MPs took him back to jail. He looked around as he walked, hoping for a glimpse of Edith. No luck. Wherever she was, she wasn't close by. He wondered whether he'd ever see her again. If the Yankees hanged him, would they be cruel enough to keep her away even then? He never wondered what the Negroes on their way to his bathhouses thought of him.

T hese days, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War had less to do. Congress had set it up to hold the Army's feet to the fire-and the Navy's, too. With the war almost won, the Senators and Representatives didn't have much to criticize. Flora Blackford wished the superbomb had vaporized Jake Featherston-but so did the Army. Sooner or later, it would catch him. Either that, or he'd die fighting to escape capture. Flora didn't much care which, as long as the world was rid of him.

A Senator was grilling a Navy captain about why the United States was having so much trouble matching the new German submersible designs. Those promised a revolution in submarine warfare once the USA got them right. That hadn't happened yet.

"Isn't it a fact, Captain Rickover, that the German Navy has had these new models in service for almost a year?"

"Yes, but we only got the plans a few months ago," Rickover answered. You tell him, Flora thought: the captain was a Jew, one of the few to rise so high. He had no give in him, continuing, "We'll get the boats built faster than the Kriegsmarine did, but we can't do it yesterday. I'm sorry. I would if I could."

"I don't need you to be facetious, Captain."

"Well, I don't need you to play Monday-morning coach, Senator, but the rules are set up to let you do that if you want to."

"Mr. Chairman, this witness is being uncooperative," the Senator complained.

"I am not," Rickover said before the chairman could rule on the dispute. "The distinguished gentleman from Dakota-a state famous for its seafaring tradition-wants the Navy Department to accomplish the impossible. The merely improbable, which we've done time and again, no longer satisfies him."

The Senator from Dakota spluttered. The chairman plied his gavel with might and main. Before Flora found out how the exciting serial ended, a page hurried up to her and whispered, "Excuse me, Congresswoman, but you have a telegram."

"Thank you." Flora stood and slipped out. Escaping this nonsense is a relief, nothing else but, she thought.

Then she saw the kid in the Western Union uniform, darker and greener than the one soldiers wore. When a messenger boy waited for you, did you really want the wire he carried? Too often, it was like seeing the Angel of Death in front of you. Her hand shook a little as she reached out for the flimsy yellow envelope.

"Much obliged, ma'am," he said when she gave him a quarter. He touched two fingers to the brim of his cap in a sort of salute, then hurried away.

She had to make herself open the envelope. The blood ran cold in her veins-it almost didn't want to run at all-when she saw the telegram was from the War Department. The Secretary of War deeply regrets to inform you… Tears blurred the words; she had to blink several times before she could see to go on…that your son, Joshua Blackford, was wounded in action on the Arkansas front. The wound is not believed to be serious, and a full recovery is expected. The printed signature of a lieutenant colonel-an assistant adjutant general-followed.

"How bad is it, ma'am?" the Congressional page asked.

"Wounded," Flora answered automatically. "The wire says they think he'll get better."

"I'm glad to hear it," the page said. If the war went on another year-which didn't seem likely-he might be in uniform himself. He probably had friends who already were. Did he have any who'd been unlucky? Flora didn't want to ask.

She hurried over to the bank of telephones down the hall from the committee meeting room. Instead of calling Lieutenant Colonel Pfeil, whose signature probably went out on dozens of wires a day, she rang up Franklin Roosevelt. In one way, a wounded private was no concern of his. But when the wounded private was the son of a Congresswoman who was also a former First Lady and who was friends with the Assistant Secretary of War…Maybe Roosevelt would know more than he might if she were calling about Private Joe Doakes.

She got through in a hurry. "Hello, Flora." Roosevelt didn't sound as ebullient as usual, so he probably knew something. "Yes, I had heard. I'm sorry," he said when she asked.

"What happened?" she demanded.

"Well, this is all unofficial, because I'm not supposed to keep track of such things, but I understand he's lost the middle finger on his left hand," Roosevelt said. "Bullet or a shell fragment-I don't know which, and I'm not sure anyone else does, either. Not a crippling wound…Um, he isn't left-handed, is he?"

"No," Flora said. She didn't know whether to be relieved it wasn't worse or horrified that it had happened at all. She ended up being both at once, a stew that made her heart pound and her stomach churn.

"That's good. If he isn't, I'd say it's what the men call a hometowner."

"A hometowner." She'd heard the phrase, too. "Alevai," she said. "By the time he gets well, the war will be over, won't it?"

"We sure hope so," Roosevelt answered. "Nothing is ever as sure as we wish it would be, but we hope so."

"Do you know where he is? The wire didn't say."

"I don't know, but I'm sure I can find out for you. Are you in your office?"

"No, I'm at a telephone outside the committee meeting room. But I can get there in five minutes."

"All right. Let me see what I can find out, and I'll call you back." The Assistant Secretary of War hung up.

Flora ducked back into the meeting room to explain what had happened. The Senators and Representatives made sympathetic noises; a lot of them had fought in the last war, and several had sons at the front this time around. Captain Rickover gave her his best wishes from the witness stand.

The telephone was ringing when she hurried into her office. Bertha stared in surprise. "Hello, Congresswoman! How funny you should walk in. Mr. Roosevelt is on the line for you."

"I'll take it right here," Flora said, and grabbed the handset away from her secretary. "Hello, Franklin! Here I am."

"Hello, Flora. Joshua is in the military hospital in Thayer, Missouri, which is right on the border with Arkansas."

"Thayer, Missouri," Flora repeated. "Thank you." She hung up, then turned to Bertha. "Get me to Thayer, Missouri, as fast as humanly possible."

That turned out to be a flight to St. Louis and a railroad journey down from the big city. Bertha squawked till she found out why Flora needed to make the trip. Then she shut up and arranged the tickets with her usual competence.

Landing in St. Louis, Flora saw to her surprise that it had been hit almost as hard as Philadelphia. The war in the West never got the press things farther east did. But Confederate bombers still came up to strike St. Louis, and long-range C.S. rockets fired from Arkansas had hit the town hard.

The train ride southwest from St. Louis to Thayer was…a train ride. Every few miles, a machine-gun nest-sometimes sandbagged, more often a concrete blockhouse-guarded the track. Here west of the Mississippi, spaces were wide and soldiers thin on the ground. Confederate raiders slipped north every now and again. The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War would have had something sharp to say about that…if it hadn't had so many other bigger things closer to home to worry about.

Thayer had gone up as a railroad town. It had flourished, in a modest way, as a cross-border trading center-and then suffered when the war strangled the trade that kept it going. The military hospital on the edge of town put a little life back into the economy-but at what a cost!

Joshua wasn't in his bed when Flora got there to see him. She feared something had gone wrong and he was back in the doctors' clutches, but the wounded man in the bed next to his said, "He's playing cards in the common room down at the end of the corridor, ma'am."

"Oh," Flora said. "Thank you."

When Flora walked in, Joshua held five cards in his right hand. Bandages swathed the left. He put down the cards to toss money into the pot. "See your five and raise you another five." Then he looked up from the poker game. "Oh, hi, Mom," he said, as if they were bumping into each other back home. "Be with you in a minute. I have to finish cleaning Spamhead's clock."

"In your dreams, kid. I'll raise you five more." Another greenback fluttered down in the center of the table. The sergeant called Spamhead did have a square, very pink face. He seemed to take the nickname for granted. Flora wouldn't have wanted to be called anything like that.

He won the pot, too-his straight beat Joshua's three tens. Joshua said, "Oh, darn!" All the other poker players laughed at him. What would he have said if his mother weren't there to hear it? Something spicier, no doubt. He stood up from the table and walked over to Flora. "I didn't think you'd get here so fast."

"How are you?" Flora asked.

Joshua raised his wounded hand. "It hurts," he said, as he might have said, It's sunny outside. "But not too bad. Plenty of guys here are worse off. Poor Spamhead lost a foot-he stepped on a mine. He's lucky it wasn't one of those bouncing ones-it would've blown his balls off… Sorry."

"It's all right," Flora told him. "How else can you say that?" Spamhead got mutilated, and Joshua think's he's lucky. I can see why, but… "What does your doctor say?"

"That it was a clean wound. That it's nothing much to flabble about. That-"

"Easy for him to say," Flora broke in indignantly. "He didn't get hurt."

"Yeah, I know. I thought of that, too," Joshua said. "But he's seen plenty worse, so it's not like he's wrong, either. I'll heal from this, and I'll heal pretty fast. The only thing I won't be able to do that I could before is give somebody the finger with my left hand."

"Joshua!" Flora wasn't exactly shocked, but she was surprised.

Her son grinned sheepishly, but not sheepishly enough-he'd done that on purpose. "I didn't even think of it," he said. "The medic who took me back to the aid station was the one who said it first."

"Terrific. Now I know who to blame." Flora sounded as if she were about to haul that medic up before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. She was tempted to do it, too. She recognized abuse of power when she saw it, which didn't mean it failed to tempt her.

Maybe Joshua saw the temptation gleaming in her eyes, for he said, "Somebody else would've come up with it if he hadn't. I would have myself, I bet-it's the way soldiers think."

"Terrific. I don't want you thinking like that," Flora said. Joshua didn't answer. He just looked at her-looked down at her, to remind her he was taller, to remind her he was grown if not grown up, to remind her that he didn't care how she wanted him to think. He would think the way he chose, not the way she did. She squeezed him, careful of the gauze-shrouded hand. "I'm glad you're going to be all right. I'm gladder than I know how to tell you."

"Sure, Mom." Joshua took it for granted. Flora didn't, couldn't, and knew she never would. She started to cry. "I'm fine, Mom," Joshua said, not understanding at all. He probably was. Flora knew too well that she wasn't.

E ver feel like a piece on a chessboard, sir?" Lon Menefee asked.

Sam Carsten nodded. "Now that you mention it, yes." The comparison wasn't one he would have made himself. Poker, pinochle, and checkers were more his speed. He knew how the different chessmen moved, but that was about it.

But the Josephus Daniels sure was making a long diagonal glide across the board of the Atlantic right now. Something big was in the wind. The Navy Department had found a more urgent assignment for her than protecting the carriers that protected the battlewagons that bombarded the coast of Haiti while Marines and soldiers went ashore.

"I'm sure not sorry to get out of range of land-based air," he said. "Even with our own flyboys overhead, I don't like that for hell."

"Worked out all right," Menefee said.

Sam had to nod. "Well, yeah. When the butternut bastards on the island saw they wouldn't be able to hold us, they couldn't give up fast enough."

The exec laughed. "D'you blame 'em?"

"Christ, no!" Sam said. "If they didn't surrender to us, the Haitians would've got 'em. They weren't up for that." Haiti had won its freedom from France in a bloody slave revolt that shocked the South a century and a half before. What the Negroes there now would have done to the Confederate soldiers they caught…Carsten's mouth tightened. "The blacks probably wouldn't have treated Featherston's fuckers any worse than they got treated themselves."

"Yes, sir," Menefee said, "but that covers one hell of a lot of ground."

"Mm." Sam let it go at that. Again, the exec wasn't wrong. The Confederates had set up one of their murder factories outside of Port-au-Prince. At first, they'd just killed Haitian soldiers and government officials. Then they'd started in on the educated people in the towns: folks who might give them trouble one of these days. Before long, all you needed was a black skin-and how many Haitians didn't have one of those?

"They'll pay," Menefee predicted. "If we can arrest the guys who ran that camp in Texas, we can do the same with the sons of bitches in the Caribbean."

"I expect you're right," Sam said. A wave rolling down from the north slapped the Josephus Daniels' port side and made the destroyer escort roll a little. She was heading east across the ocean as fast as she could go, east and north. Musingly, Sam went on, "I wonder how long we'll stay out of range of land-based air."

"You think U.S. troops will land on Ireland the way we did on Haiti, sir?" Menefee asked. "That'd be a rougher job. Logistics are worse, and the limeys aren't knocked flat the way the Confederates were."

"It's one of the things I'm wondering about," Sam answered. "The other one is, what's the Kaiser going to do now? Yeah, England dropped a superbomb on Hamburg, but how many more does Churchill have? You don't want to piss the Germans off, because whatever you go and do to them, they'll do to you doubled and redoubled." He wasn't a great bridge player, either, but he could talk the lingo.

"Beats me," Menefee said. "I expect we'll find out before too long."

The Josephus Daniels remained part of the flotilla that had landed troops on Haiti. Sam felt a certain amount of satisfaction because the destroyer escort wasn't the slowest ship in it-the baby flattops were. He wouldn't have done without them for the world; if he really was sailing against the British Isles, he wanted all the air cover he could get. In fact, he wanted even more air cover than that.

Summer in the North Atlantic was much more pleasant than winter. Days were longer, seas were calmer, and the sun was brighter. Lon Menefee tanned. Sam reddened and burned and wore his hat whenever he went out on deck. He exchanged resigned looks with the handful of sailors who came close to being as fair as he was.

Nobody on the destroyer escort was eager to run into the Royal Navy. Britain's fleet didn't have the worldwide reach it had enjoyed before the Great War. Where it still went, though, it remained a highly capable outfit.

A destroyer off on the other side of the flotilla heard, or thought she heard, a submersible lurking in the sea. She prosecuted the sub with a shower of ashcans. There was no triumphant signal showing the enemy boat-if it was an enemy boat-had gone to the bottom. Sam didn't much care. As long as the sub couldn't launch torpedoes, he stayed happy.

He began haunting the wireless shack, as he'd done aboard several other ships, he'd served. He noticed he wasn't the only one; all the officers and chiefs seemed to be waiting for the other shoe to drop.

But he was asleep in his cabin when it did. The clatter of running feet on the steel of the corridor floor woke him a split second before someone pounded on the door. "It's open!" he called, turning on the lamp and sitting up in his narrow bed. He didn't have two more sailors right over his head, the way he did when he first put to sea.

Yeoman van Duyk burst into the cabin. "They've gone and done it, sir!" he said, his voice cracking with excitement.

"Who? The Germans?" Sam asked around a yawn. A hot flask full of coffee stood on the steel nightstand. He grabbed for it-he didn't think he'd need to worry about sleep any more tonight. "London?"

"Yes, sir." Van Duyk nodded. "And Brighton, and Norwich-all at the same time, or close enough."

"Sweet Jesus!" Sam exclaimed. As he poured from the hot flask, he found himself wanting to improve the coffee with a slug of medicinal brandy. He didn't, not with the rating standing there. "Did they get Churchill? Did they get the King?"

"I took this off the German wireless, sir, so they don't know," van Duyk answered. "No word from the BBC yet."

"All right. Thanks." Sam's guess was that the Prime Minister and King Edward and his family would have got out of London even before the RAF hit Hamburg. They had to know the Kaiser would land a superbomb there sooner or later. "What else did the Germans say?"

"That they had more where those three came from, and that they were ready to knock England for a loop if that was what it took to get the limeys out of the war."

"Jesus!" Sam said again. "How much of this poor, sorry world's gonna be left if we keep blowing chunks of it off the map?"

"Beats me, sir," van Duyk said. "I better get back to the shack." He sketched a salute and disappeared.

"And I better get my ass up to the bridge," Sam said, even though nobody was there to hear him. He put on his shoes and jacket; he'd slept in the rest of his clothes. He'd look a little rumpled, but the world wouldn't end.

The exec had the conn when Carsten came in. "You heard, sir?" Menefee asked.

"You bet I did," Sam answered. "Three at once? They must be turning those bastards out in carload lots."

"They're lucky they didn't get one of their bombers shot down."

"Damn right they are. I bet they snuck 'em in as part of a big raid. That way, the limeys couldn't know which machines to go after. Maybe they had fighters flying escort, too-with the Y-ranging sets they've got nowadays, you can see what you're going after even at night."

"Makes sense." The exec nodded. "You've been thinking about this."

Sam gave him a crooked grin. "Didn't know it wasn't in the rules. But you're right-I have. I figured the Kaiser had to hit back. If I was him, how would I go about it?"

"What will England do now?" Menefee wondered.

"Depends on how many bombs she's got, I suppose," Sam said. "If she has more, she'll use 'em. If she doesn't…How can she go on?"

"Beats me," Menefee said.

"Hell, if it wasn't for Churchill, I bet England would have quit already," Sam said. "Him and Featherston-the other side's got the stubborn so-and-sos."

"Now we hope he's dead," the exec said.

"Amen." Sam and Thad Walters spoke at the same time. They looked at each other and grinned.

But Churchill wasn't dead. He went on the BBC about half an hour later. Van Duyk called Sam down to the wireless shack. The British Prime Minister was speaking from "somewhere in the United Kingdom." He sounded furious, too. "If the Hun thinks we are beaten, let him think again," he thundered. "We shall avenge this monstrous crime. Even now, the Angel of Death unfolds his wings over a German city I do not choose to name. With weeping and repentance shall the Kaiser rue the day he chose to try conclusions with us."

"Wow!" Sam said. "Too bad he's not one of the good guys-he gives a hell of a speech."

"Yes, sir." Van Duyk turned the dial on the shortwave set. "Sounds like the Germans are going to get hit right about now. Let's see what they have to say."

He found the English-language German wireless. "There is a report of what may have been a superbomb explosion between Bruges and Ghent, in Belgium," the announcer said, only the slightest guttural accent betraying his homeland. "One of our turbo-engined night fighters brought down a British bomber in approximately the same location. If the Angel of Death sought to spread his wings over Germany tonight, he fell short by a good many kilometers."

Van Duyk whooped. "Up yours, Winston!" Sam said. He hurried up to the bridge to spread the news.

"Oh, my," Lon Menefee said. "Well, how many more cards do the limeys have?"

"We'll find out," Sam said. "Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of 'As the World Goes up in Smoke,' brought to you by the Jameson Casket and Mortuary Company. Our slogan is 'You're going to die sometime-why not now?'"

"Ouch!" Lieutenant Walters said.

"Lord, it's the way things look," Carsten said wearily. "This can't go on much longer-can it?" He sounded as if he was pleading-and he was.

"Ask Featherston. Ask Churchill," Lieutenant Menefee said. "They're the ones who have to quit."

"Can't happen soon enough," Sam said. "It's pretty much pointless now. We know who won. We know who lost. Only thing we don't know is how many dead there are." He paused. "Well, maybe Churchill has enough bombs left to force a draw. Doesn't look like Featherston does."

"I just don't want to see a bomber coming over us at thirty thousand feet, that's all," Walters said.

"Yipes!" Ice walked up Sam's spine. "I didn't even think of that." He made as if to look at the sky. No CAP at night. It wouldn't be flying anywhere near so high, anyway. Who'd ever imagined you might need to? But a superbomb didn't need to score a direct hit to ruin a warship. He wanted to turn around and run for home. But he couldn't, and the Josephus Daniels steamed on.

T his is going to hurt a little."

Michael Pound had come to hate those words, because a little always turned into a lot. He'd never imagined changing dressings on his burned legs could hurt so much. And, at that, there were plenty of guys who had it worse than he did. Some of the badly burned men-pilots and other aircrew, most of them, and a few soldiers from barrels with them-needed morphine every time they got fresh bandages. He didn't, not any more.

He missed the stuff now that he wasn't getting it, but not enough to make him think he'd turned into a junkie. It did do more against pain than whatever else they had; codeine wasn't much stronger than aspirin by comparison. He could bear what he had to live with, though. When he heard other men howling, he understood the meaning of the phrase it could be worse.

The military hospital was somewhere near Chattanooga. Formidable defenses kept snipers and auto bombs at bay. From what everybody said, holding the CSA down was proving almost as expensive as conquering the damn place had been. That wasn't good, but Pound couldn't do anything about it.

He got his Purple Heart. He got a Bronze Star to go with his Silver Star. He didn't particularly think he deserved one, but nobody asked him. He got promoted to first lieutenant, which thrilled him less than the brass who gave him a silver bar on each shoulder strap probably thought it would. And he got a letter from General Morrell. Morrell wasn't just an old acquaintance-he was a friend, despite differences in rank. And he'd been wounded, too. A letter from him really did mean something.

"You should do very well, Lieutenant," a doctor told Pound one day. "A lot of third-degree burns are much deeper, and impair function even when they heal well. You'll have some nasty scars, but I don't think you'll even limp."

"Terrific," Pound said. "How would you like it if somebody said something like that about your legs? Especially when you were hurting like a son of a bitch while he did it?"

The doctor pulled up the left sleeve of his white coat. His arm had scars that made nasty look like an understatement. "I was in a motorcar crash ten years ago," he said. "I know what I'm talking about-and now we can do things for burns they didn't dream of back then."

"Can you use your hand?" Pound asked.

"Thumb and first two fingers," the doctor replied. "The tendons and nerves to the others are pretty much shot, but I've got the important ones, anyhow. You don't have that worry-I know your toes work."

"Uh-huh," Pound said unenthusiastically. He knew they worked, too; the therapists made him wiggle them. That made him forget about the rest of his pain-it felt as if a flamethrower were toasting them.

"Just hang on," the doctor said. "It's a bitch while it's going on, but it gets better. You have to give it time, that's all."

Pound couldn't even tell him to go to hell, because the other man had been through what he was in the middle of now and had come out the other side. "It is a bitch," was as much as he thought he could say.

"Oh, I know," the doctor answered quietly. "I still miss the needle sometimes, but I'll be damned if I go back to it…and you can take that any way you please." He nodded and walked on to the next patient.

He looked like such a mild little fellow, too: the kind who slid through life without anything much ever happening to him. Which only proved you never could tell. Michael Pound had seen that plenty of times with soldiers he got to know. He wondered why he was so surprised now.

He wished he could get up and do things, but he was stuck on his back-or sometimes, to stave off bedsores, on his stomach. The therapists said he could put weight on his feet in a couple of weeks. He looked forward to that, and then again he didn't. Till you'd been through a lot of pain, you didn't understand how much you wanted to stay away from more.

In the meantime, he had magazines and newspapers and the handful of books in the hospital library. He voraciously devoured them. He also had the wireless. He would have listened to news almost all the time. The other guys in the ward plumped for music and comedies and dramas. Pound endured their programs-he couldn't try throwing his weight around, not unless he wanted everybody else to hate him. But the news was all that really mattered to him.

Sometimes the other burned men gave in to him, too, especially in the middle of the night when they were all too likely to be awake and when the regular programs were even crappier than they were the rest of the time. And so he was listening to a news program when a flash came in.

"We interrupt this broadcast," said the man behind the mike. "This just in from the BBC-the Churchill government has fallen. Parliament voted no confidence in the Churchill-Mosley regime that has run the United Kingdom for more than ten years. Pending elections, a caretaker government under Sir Horace Wilson has been formed. Wilson has announced that his first action as Prime Minister will be to seek an armistice from the Kaiser."

The room erupted. A nurse rushed in to quiet the whoops and cheers. When she found out what had happened, she let out a whoop herself.

"They only had two!" Pound said.

"Two what?" the nurse asked.

"Two bombs," Pound and two other guys said at the same time. Pound went on, "They had two, and the second one didn't go off where they wanted it to, and that was it. Now the Germans can blow up their cities one at a time, and they can't hit back."

"Wow," the nurse said. "Are you a general? You talk like a general."

"I'm a lieutenant," he answered. "I've got gray hair 'cause I was a sergeant for years and years. They finally promoted me, and they've been regretting it ever since."

She laughed. "You're funny, too! I like that."

He wished he had a private room. Maybe something interesting would have happened. The ward didn't even boast curtains around the beds. Whatever they did to you, everybody else got to watch. After a while, you mostly didn't care. This once, Pound might have.

"Only Featherston left," said the man in the next bed.

"What do we do when we catch him?" somebody asked.

"String him up!" The answer came from Pound and several other wounded soldiers at the same time. It also came from the nurse. She suggested stringing the President of the CSA up by some highly sensitive parts of his anatomy. Coming from most women, that would have shocked Pound. He'd seen that nurses had mouths at least as raunchy as those of soldiers. It made sense: nurses saw plenty of horrors, too.

"My God," someone else said. "The war really is just about over."

Nobody made any snide comments about that. Maybe the other men in the ward had as much trouble taking it in as Michael Pound did. The war had consumed his whole being for the past three years-and before that, when he'd been down in Houston before it returned to the CSA, he might as well have been at war.

He wondered what he'd do when peace finally broke out. Would the Army want to keep a first lieutenant with gray hair? The service needed some grizzled noncoms; they tempered junior officers' puppyish enthusiasm. But he'd never be anything more than a junior officer himself, and he was much too goddamn old for the role.

If they turned him loose, if they patted him on the back and said, Well done-now we'll go use up somebody else, what the hell would he do then? He had no idea. The thought was frightening enough. The Army had been his life since he was eighteen years old.

They couldn't just throw him out…could they?

"Shit," another burned man said. "This fuckin' war's never gonna be over-excuse my French, miss."

"I've heard the words before," the nurse said dryly.

The soldiers laughed. The one who'd been talking went on, "It won't be. Honest to God, it won't. Maybe the Confederate government finally surrenders, yeah, but we'll stay on occupation duty down here forever. Lousy bushwhackers and diehards won't start singing 'The Star-Spangled Banner' tomorrow, and you can take that to the bank. We have grandchildren, they'll be down here shooting at waddayacallems-rebels."

Three or four guys groaned, probably because they thought the burned man was likely to be right. Michael Pound felt like cheering, for exactly the same reason. He didn't-everybody else would have thought he was nuts. But he felt like it. If the war, or something a lot like the war, went on and on, the Army wouldn't have any excuse to throw him out on his ear.

Well, it wouldn't have any excuse except maybe that he'd made himself too obnoxious for the brass to stand. Not without pride, he figured he was capable of that.

"Once we get done licking the Confederates, do we go after the Japs next?" asked the guy in the next bed.

If the General Staff of the burn ward of the military hospital outside Chattanooga had their way, the answer to that one was no. Pound wouldn't have minded seeing the Sandwich Islands, but not as a way station to a battle somewhere even farther off in the Pacific. The Japs had their sphere, and the United States had theirs, and as long as neither side poached on the other that was fine with him.

He did say, "I bet they're working overtime in Tokyo, trying to figure out how to build a superbomb."

"Wouldn't you be?" said the soldier next to him.

"You bet I would," Pound answered. "As long as we've got it and they don't, it's a club we can use to beat them over the head. I bet the Tsar's telling all his scientists they're heading for Siberia if they don't make one PDQ, too. If the Germans have one and the Russians don't, they're in big trouble."

He wondered whether Austria-Hungary would try to make one. Berlin was the senior partner there, and had been since the early days of the Great War. Germany had saved Austria-Hungary's bacon against the Russians then, and again this time around. But Vienna had some clever scientists, too. You never could tell, Pound decided with profound unoriginality.

"Before long, everybody and his mother-in-law's going to have those…miserable things." A soldier had mercy on the nurse's none-too-delicate ears. "How do we keep from blowing each other to kingdom come?"

That was a good question. It was probably the question on the minds of the striped-pants set these days. If the diplomats came up with a halfway decent answer, they would earn their salaries and then some.

Michael Pound thought about the CSA's rockets. If you could load superbombs onto bigger, better ones, you could blow up anybody you didn't like, even if he didn't live next door. Wouldn't that be fun?

Could you make a rocket shoot down another rocket? Airplanes shot down airplanes…some of the time, anyhow. Why shouldn't rockets shoot down rockets…some of the time, anyhow? Would that be enough? Pound had no idea, which left him in the same leaky boat as everybody else in the world.