In At the Death

II

Camp Humble wasn't perfect, but it came as close as Jefferson Pinkard could make it. The commandant probably had more experience with camps designed to get rid of people than anybody else in the business. One thing he'd learned was not to call it that or even think of it like that. Reducing population was a phrase with far fewer unpleasant associations.

That mattered. It mattered a surprising amount. Guards who brooded about the things they did had a way of eating their guns or otherwise doing themselves in. If you gave it a name that seemed innocuous, they didn't need to brood so much.

Back at Camp Dependable, outside of Alexandria, Louisiana, guards had actually taken Negroes out into the swamps and shot them. That was hard on the men-not as hard as it was on the Negroes, but hard enough. Things got better when Jeff thought of asphyxiating trucks. Then the guards didn't have to pull the trigger themselves. They didn't have to deal with blood spraying everywhere and with screams and with men who weren't quite dead. All they had to do was take out bodies and get rid of them. That was a hell of a lot easier.

And the poison-gas chambers he'd started at Camp Determination in west Texas were better yet. They got rid of more blacks faster than the trucks did, and saved on fuel besides. The prairie out by Snyder offered plenty of room for mass graves as big as anybody could want. Everything at Camp Determination would have been, if not perfect, at least pretty damn good, if not for the…

"Damnyankees," Pinkard muttered. "God fry the stinking damnyankees in their own grease." Who would have figured the U.S. Army would push into west Texas? One of the reasons for building Camp Determination way out there was that it was the ass end of nowhere. The enemy hadn't seemed likely to bother a camp there.

But the Freedom Party underestimated how much propaganda the USA could get out of the camps. And earlier this year the United States had attacked everywhere they could, all at once: not seriously, but hard enough to keep the CSA from reinforcing the defenders in Kentucky and Tennessee, where the real action was. And it worked. Kentucky and Tennessee were lost, and Georgia was in trouble.

And Camp Determination was lost, too. The United States had bombed the rail lines coming into the camp so it couldn't reduce population the way it was supposed to. And they'd also bombed the crap out of Snyder; Jeff thanked God his own family came through all right. The Confederate defenders finally had to pull back, so now the Yankees had all the atrocity photos they wanted.

And Jefferson Pinkard had Camp Humble. Humble, Texas, just north of Houston, lay far enough east that the United States wouldn't overrun it unless the Confederacy really went down the drain. The USA had a much harder time bombing the rail lines that came through here, too. So Negroes came in, they got into trucks that took them nowhere except to death, or they went into bathhouses that pumped out cyanide instead of hot water. After that, they went up in smoke. Literally.

Pinkard scowled. The crematorium wasn't up to snuff. The outfit that built it had sold the CSA a bill of goods. The smoke that billowed from the tall stacks stank of burnt meat. It left greasy soot wherever it touched. Sometimes bits of real flesh went up the stacks and came down a surprising distance away. You couldn't very well keep Camp Humble's purpose a secret with a thing like that stinking up the air for miles around.

Somebody knocked on the door to Jeff 's office. "It's open," he called. "Come on in." A guard with a worried look obeyed. Guards who came into the commandant's office almost always wore a worried look; they wouldn't have been there if they didn't have something to worry about. "Well?" Jeff asked.

"Sir, we got us a nigger says he knows you," the guard said.

"And you waste my time with that shit?" Pinkard said scornfully. "Christ on a crutch, McIlhenny, it happens once a trainload. Either these coons know me or they're asshole buddies with the President, one. Like anybody'd be dumb enough to believe 'em."

"Sir, this here nigger's named Vespasian," McIlhenny said. "Says you and him and another coon named, uh, Agrippa used to work together at the Sloss Works in Birmingham. Reckon he's about your age, anyways."

"Well, fuck me," Jeff said in surprise.

"He's telling the truth?" the gray-uniformed guard asked.

"I reckon maybe he is," Jeff said. "The last war, they started using niggers more in factory jobs when white men got conscripted. I did work with those two, hell with me if I didn't."

"We didn't send him on right away," McIlhenny said. "Wanted to find out what you had in mind first. You want, we can get rid of him. Or if you want to see him, we can do that, too."

"Vespasian." Jefferson Pinkard's voice was far away. He hadn't thought about Vespasian in years. Sometimes the years he'd put in at the steel mill seemed to have happened to someone else, or in a different lifetime. But he said, "Yeah, I'll talk to him. He wasn't a bad nigger-not uppity or anything. And he worked pretty hard."

"We were gonna put him in a truck," the guard said. If they had, Vespasian wouldn't be seeing anybody this side of the Pearly Gates. He looked apprehensive. Asphyxiating somebody the commandant really knew wouldn't do wonders for your career.

"Well, I'm glad you didn't." Pinkard heaved his bulk out of the chair behind his desk. A lot of fat padded the hard muscles he'd got working in the foundry. He grabbed a submachine gun off a wall bracket and made sure the drum magazine that fed it was full. If Vespasian had some sort of revenge in mind, he wouldn't go on a truck after all. Instead, he'd get ventilated on the spot. "Take me to him. He in the holding area?"

"Sure is, sir," the guard answered. Camp Humble had one, to give the guards the chance to deal with prisoners who were dangerous or just unusual.

"You searched him?" Jeff took nothing for granted. Some of the people who worked for him were dumb as rocks.

But the guard nodded. "Sure did, sir. Up the ass and everything." He made a face. "He ain't got nothin'."

"All right, then," Jeff said. It sounded as if the men in gray were on the ball this time.

When they got to the holding area, he found two more guards aiming assault rifles at Vespasian. One of them blinked. "Be damned," he said. "This mangy old coon wasn't blowing smoke, then?"

Vespasian wasn't exactly mangy, but he was only a shadow of the burly buck who'd worked alongside Jefferson Pinkard half a lifetime earlier. He was gray-haired and scrawny, and looked like a man who'd been through hell. If his train ride from Birmingham to Camp Humble was like most, he had. A powerful stench clung to him. He hadn't washed in a long time, and hadn't always made it to a toilet or a slop bucket, either.

He nodded to Jeff not as one equal to another, but as a man who knew another man, anyhow. "Really is you, Mistuh Pinkard," he said, his voice desert-dry and rough. "Been a hell of a long time, ain't it?"

"Sure as hell has," Jeff answered. He turned to the guards. "Get him some water. Reckon he can use it."

"Do Jesus! You right about that," Vespasian croaked. When the water came-in a pail, not a glass-he drank and drank. How long had he gone without? Days, plainly. And when he said, "That was mighty fine," he sounded much more like his old self.

"What ever happened to that no-account cousin of yours or whatever the hell he was?" Jeff asked. "You know the one I mean-the guy they threw in jail. What the hell was his name?"

"You mean Leonidas?" Vespasian said, and Jeff nodded. The black man went on, "They let him out after the las' war was over-decided he weren't no danger to the country or nobody else. He kept his nose clean afterwards. Got married, had a couple chillun. Died o' TB a little befo' the new war start."

"How about that?" Jeff said. "I plumb lost touch with Birmingham lately." He hesitated, then waved the guards away. "I'll be all right, dammit," he told them. "I got a gun, and he ain't dumb enough to give me no trouble." They didn't like it, but the man who made the rules could break them, too. When the guards were out of earshot, Jeff asked Vespasian, "Ever hear what happened to that gal I used to be married to?"

"Yes, suh." Vespasian nodded. "She went downhill pretty bad. Got to drinkin' an' carryin' on with men. Ain't heard nothin' 'bout her in a while, though. Dunno if she's alive or dead."

"Huh." Jeff 's grunt was more self-satisfied than anything else. Run around on him, would Emily? Whatever she got after he cut her loose served her right, as far as he was concerned. "Bitch," he muttered under his breath. "Probably had a goddamn taxi meter between her legs."

Vespasian either didn't catch that or had the sense to pretend he didn't. He lifted the pail to his mouth again. Pinkard tensed. If he threw it…But he set it down and wiped his mouth on his filthy sleeve. "Ask you somethin' now, suh?"

"Go ahead," Jeff told him.

"What you do with me, now that I'm here?"

"You give people trouble?"

"Now, Mistuh Pinkard, you know I ain't like that," Vespasian said reproachfully.

"I sure do." Jeff nodded. "I told McIlhenny the same thing when he said you were asking for me. So you just stay in the barracks and do like the guards tell you, and everything'll be fine."

"Sure weren't fine comin' here." Vespasian didn't sound as if he believed a word of it. He was nobody's fool, evidently. Jeff knew what kind of lies he was telling. He didn't have anything against Vespasian as a man, but he didn't have the kind of affection for him that would have made him want to keep his former coworker around in defiance of the rules. The rules said the Confederacy needed to get rid of blacks. They caused the country more trouble than they were worth. From everything Jefferson Pinkard had seen, that was the gospel truth. And it was just Vespasian's hard luck that he'd finally wound up at Camp Humble.

So Jeff shrugged and spread his hands and went right on lying. "I am sorry about that, honest to God. Wish it could've been better. But there's a war on." That was the handy-dandy excuse for anything these days.

"Ain't no reason to leave a man in his own filth. Ain't no reason to have people die on the way to this here place," Vespasian said. "What's gonna happen to us all now that we's here?" Fear and apprehension roughened his voice.

"You got to remember, this is nothin' but a transit camp," Jeff said-one more lie piled on all the others. "You'll get some food, you'll get cleaned up, and we'll send you on the way again." And so they would, on a journey from which Vespasian wouldn't come back. "Then you'll sit out the war somewhere else. Once we're done licking the damnyankees, I reckon you'll go on back to Birmingham. We'll sort all that shit out then."

"I got to wait till we lick the USA, reckon I'll be at that other camp forever," Vespasian said.

The gibe held much more truth than Jeff wished it did. It also played on his own fears. He tried not to show that, but he did call the guards back. "Take him off to the barracks that's scheduled for the bathhouse next," he told them. "Once he gets cleaned up, we'll go from there."

"Yes, sir," the guards chorused. One of them nudged Vespasian. "Come on. You heard the boss. Get moving."

Away Vespasian went. Did he know Jeff had just ordered him liquidated? Pretty soon, he'd go up the crematorium stack, one more smudge of soot in a system that didn't work as well as advertised. Jeff might have found a lesson there had he been looking for one. Since he wasn't, he didn't worry about it. He had a job to do, and he aimed to keep at it till it was done.

C ongresswoman Flora Blackford was sick to death of war. She didn't know of anyone in the USA who wasn't. But she also didn't know of anyone except a few fools and lunatics who wanted to make peace with the Confederate States and Jake Featherston. There'd been more doubt and disagreement during the Great War. Had the European powers patched up a peace then, odds were the USA and CSA would have done the same. Now…The one thing Featherston had done was unify the United States-against him. No arguments about workers' solidarity now, not even from the hardcore wing of the Socialist Party. Getting rid of the enemy came first.

Her secretary stuck her head into Flora's inner office. "The Assistant Secretary of War is on the line, Congresswoman," she said.

"Thank you, Bertha. Put him through," Flora said.

She picked up the telephone on her desk even before the first ring finished. "Hello, Flora," Franklin Roosevelt boomed. "How are you this lovely morning?"

Flora looked out the masking-taped window. It was pouring rain, and the weatherman said there was a chance of sleet tonight. Winter hadn't got to Philadelphia, but you could see it coming. Roosevelt's office down in the bowels of the War Department was only a few blocks from hers. "Have you been down there so long you've forgotten it's not July any more?" she asked.

He chuckled merrily. "Well, you can see when you come over."

Telephone lines coming out of the War Department and the Congressional office building were supposed to be the most secure in the USA. Saying too much over them wasn't a good idea anyhow. Roosevelt had something interesting, though. Flora was sure of that. "On my way," she told him, and hung up.

Had the weather been halfway decent, she would have walked. As things were, she flagged a cab. Even the short ride showed her a couple of hits from the new Confederate rockets. They were aiming at the center of government, but weren't especially accurate; they fell all over Philadelphia. No warning was possible. The only thing you could do to stay safe was to be somewhere else when they came down.

"Ain't they terrible? Ain't they wicked?" said the cab driver, a middle-aged woman. "How come we don't got nothin' like that?"

"I expect we're working on them." Flora wasn't exactly giving away military secrets by admitting that.

"We shoulda done it first," the cabby said. "Blow them Confederate bastards to kingdom come without our boys gettin' hurt."

"That would be good." Flora thought of her own son. Joshua was in basic training now. Pretty soon, if the war didn't end first, they'd give him a rifle and turn him loose on the enemy. The enemy, unfortunately, had rifles-among other things-too.

Flora paid the driver, opened the cab's door, opened her umbrella, and splashed up the broad stairs to the entrance to the War Department. She didn't get very wet, but she didn't exactly stay dry, either. At the entrance, soldiers examined her ID with remorseless care before letting her in. She didn't get very far in even then, not at first. A hard-faced woman frisked her in a sandbagged revetment that could blunt the force of a people bomb. Only then did a private with peach fuzz escort her down, down, down to Franklin Roosevelt's office.

"You look like something the cat dragged in," the Assistant Secretary of War exclaimed. "Can I fix you a drink? Purely medicinal, of course."

"Of course," Flora said, deadpan. "Thanks. I'd love one."

The medicinal alcohol turned out to be some fine scotch. "Confiscated from a British freighter," Roosevelt explained. "I arranged for a friend of mine in the Navy Department to get some good Tennessee sipping whiskey, and this is how he scratched my back."

"Nice to have friends," Flora said. "I like scotch better, too."

"I still owe him a little something, or maybe not such a little something," Roosevelt said. "The Navy's been nice to us lately."

"Has it?" Flora said. When Roosevelt nodded, she went on, "Does that have something to do with why you called me over?"

He beamed at her. "I knew you were smart. It sure does. A few days ago, one of our destroyer escorts met the U-517 somewhere in the North Atlantic. The Navy and the Germans worked out just where. It doesn't matter anyhow, except that they did meet. The skipper of the submersible passed a package to the skipper of the Josephus Daniels-that's the destroyer escort. Our ship brought the package in to Boston, and now we've got it."

"What is it?" Flora asked. "Something to do with uranium, unless I'm crazy."

"Right the first time," Franklin Roosevelt agreed. "We finally managed to talk the Kaiser into letting us know just how far along the Germans are."

"And?"

"And they're ahead of us. Well, no surprise-most of the top nuclear physicists come from Germany or Austria-Hungary, and Bohr from Denmark is working for them, too," Roosevelt said. "But this will speed us up. I don't know all the details yet. Our people are still trying to figure out what the details are, if you know what I mean. It's good news, though."

"Sounds like it," Flora said. "Have we got any good news about these Confederate rockets?"

"Not much." Roosevelt's jaunty smile slipped. When it did, she could see how worn and weary he was. He looked like a man busy working himself to death. She couldn't even say anything, because he was far from the only one doing the same thing. He paused to light a cigarette and suck in smoke through the holder he liked to use. "About all we can do is bomb their launchers, and they've made them portable, so the damn things-excuse me-aren't easy to find."

"And in the meantime we sit here and take it," Flora said. "Can we bomb the factories where they make the rockets?"

"When we find 'em, we'll bomb 'em," Roosevelt promised. "I wish the Confederates would paint Rocket Factory on the roof in big letters. It sure would make reconnaissance a lot easier. We do keep plugging away."

"I'm so glad," Flora murmured, which made Roosevelt laugh. "What about the town where they're working on uranium? Are we still giving it the once-over?"

"Every chance we get," he replied. "They've got antiaircraft fire like you wouldn't believe all around Lexington-oops. Pretend you didn't hear that."

"Pretend I didn't hear what?" Flora said, and Franklin Roosevelt laughed again.

"Yeah, the flak is thick enough to land on, the pilots say," he continued, "and they put night fighters in the air, too. They've quit pretending it's not important. They know we know it is, and they're doing their best to keep us away."

"I take it their best isn't good enough?"

The Assistant Secretary of War shook his strong-jawed head. "Not even close. We're punishing them-that's the only word for it. I happen to know their boss researcher went to Richmond not long ago to squall like a branded calf. I wish I would have found out sooner. I might have tried to arrange to put him out of action for good."

"You have people in Richmond who can arrange that?" Flora asked with faint, or maybe not so faint, distaste. The Confederates made a policy of rubbing out U.S. officers they found dangerous. Turnabout was fair play, but even so…"War is a filthy business."

"It sure is. And the only thing worse than a war is a lost war. Two of those a lifetime ago almost ruined the country forever," Roosevelt said. "So, yes, there are people who would have tried to make sure Professor So-and-So never stood up in front of a blackboard again. No guarantees, of course, but we would have had a go at it."

"Would killing him make that much difference to the Confederate war effort?"

"No way to be sure, but we think so. He gets almost anything he wants when it comes to money and equipment. They know how important a uranium bomb is for them. If they get it first, they can still lick us. If they don't, we'll knock them flat and then we'll start kicking them."

"Alevai," Flora said. Roosevelt looked quizzical; no reason he should know Yiddish. She explained: "It means something like hopefully or God willing."

"He'd better be willing. If He's not, He's as sleepy as Elijah said Baal was," Roosevelt said. "They need licking, dammit. That Camp Determination turned out to be even worse than you said. I hadn't imagined it could, but there you are. What General Dowling found would gag a maggot. It really would."

Flora resisted the impulse to shout, I told you so! She had, over and over again, but it was too late to do anything about that now. Instead, she said, "It's not the only camp they're running. They've got plenty more, from east Texas to Alabama. If we can wreck the rail lines going into them, we slow the slaughter, anyhow."

"We're doing some of that," Roosevelt said. "It's not our top priority, I admit. Beating the enemy in the field is. But we're doing what we can." He clicked his tongue between his teeth. "With all the effort the Confederate States are putting into the camps, I think Featherston would just as soon kill off his Negroes as beat us. If that's not insane, it's certainly strange."

"Depends on how you look at things," Flora replied. "Even if they lose, the Negroes will still be gone for good. And the Freedom Party thinks it is good."

"If they lose, the Freedom Party is gone for good. I don't think they've figured that out yet," Roosevelt said grimly. "If they lose, chances are the Confederate States of America are gone for good, too. I'm sure those goons haven't figured that out yet."

"What do we do with them?" Flora asked. "Can we occupy everything from the border of Alaska all the way to the Rio Grande?"

"Can we not?" Roosevelt returned, and she had no good answer for him.

"What we got from the Germans really will help us build our bomb?" she said. He was bound to be right about one thing: winning came first.

"The physicists say it will. They're right more often than they're wrong, seems like. They'd better be, anyhow," Roosevelt said. "I just pray some British or French sub hasn't carried papers like that to the Confederacy."

"Oy!" That dismayed Flora into Yiddish again. "That would be terrible!"

"It sure would," Roosevelt said. "And the Confederates have something to trade for it, too. I bet the English and the French would just love to shoot rockets way into Germany."

"Oy!" Flora repeated. "What can we do about it?"

"Sink all the submersibles we can, and hope we get the one that's packed full of secret plans," Roosevelt answered. "And yes, I know-what are the odds? But we can't very well tell the enemy not to help their allies. That would make them more likely to do it, not less."

"I'm afraid you're right," Flora said after thinking it over. She sighed. "When we broke into Georgia, I thought the war was as good as won. But it'll come right down to the wire, won't it?"

"Maybe not. Maybe we'll just knock them flat," the Assistant Secretary of War said. "But they've got some rabbits they could pull out of the hat. We'll do everything we can to steal the hat or burn it, but if they hang on to it…Last time around, we could see we'd win months before we finally did. Not so easy to be sure now. That's not for public consumption, of course. Officially, everything's just fine."

"Officially, everything's always fine. Officially, everything was fine when the Confederates were driving on Lake Erie to cut us in half," Flora said.

"Can't go around saying things are bad and we're losing. People might believe us."

"Why? They don't believe us when we tell them everything's just fine. By now, they must figure we lie to them all the time." Flora listened to herself with something approaching horror. Had she really turned so cynical? She feared she had.

T he British ambassador is here to see you, Mr. President," Jake Featherston's secretary announced.

"Thanks, Lulu. Send him in," the President of the CSA said.

Lord Halifax was tall and thin, with a long bald head and a pinched mouth and jaw. He reminded Jake of a walking thermometer, bulb uppermost. No matter what he looked like, though, no denying he was one sharp bird. "Mr. President," he murmured in an accent almost a caricature of an upper-class Englishman's.

"Good to see you, Your Excellency." Featherston held out his hand. Halifax shook it. His grip wasn't the dead fish you would expect. The President waved him to a chair. "Have a seat. Glad you came through the last raid all right."

"Our embassy has an excellent shelter. Indeed, these days the shelter is the embassy, more or less," Halifax said. "The chaps who stay on, I'm afraid, draw hazardous-duty pay."

You can't stop the United States from bombing the crap out of your capital. That was what he meant, even if he was too much the diplomat to come out and say it. "Yeah, well, I hear the Germans and Austrians up in Philadelphia get bonuses, too," Jake said. They may be hurting us, but we're still in it. In meetings like this, words were smoke screens, concealing what lay behind them.

"Indeed," Halifax said, which might have meant It could be or, just as easily, My ass.

"I'm hoping your country can do more to keep the Canadians fired up against the United States," Jake said.

"Believe me, Mr. President, we're doing everything we can, this being in our interest as well," Lord Halifax replied. "The naval situation in the Atlantic remaining complex, however, we cannot do as much as we would wish. And events on the Continent naturally influence other commitments of scarce resources."

Jake had no trouble translating that into plain English. The Germans were pushing England and France back. The limeys didn't have so much to spare for adventures on this side of the Atlantic as they'd had when things were going better closer to home.

"What the damnyankees aren't using up there, they're shooting at us," Featherston said. "If we go under, they aim everything at you. How long do you think you'll last if they do?" They had a generation earlier, and the United Kingdom didn't last long. Chances were it wouldn't now, either.

And Lord Halifax couldn't shoot that one back at him. The USA could go after Britain in a big way if the CSA went under-could and would. But if Britain went down, Germany wouldn't care about the Confederacy. The Confederate States were no threat to the Kaiser, not till they got a uranium bomb. When they did, the whole goddamn world needed to watch out.

"I said we were doing everything we could, Mr President, and I assure you I meant it most sincerely," the British ambassador said. "We appreciate the CSA's importance to the overall strategic picture, believe you me we do. Our task would become much more difficult if the United States was prosecuting the Atlantic war with all their energy and resources."

You are tying the damnyankees down for us. Again, Halifax's words were pretty straightforward. He had to figure Jake could see that much for himself. And Jake could.

He leaned forward across his desk toward the limey. "Fair enough," he said, his rasping voice and harsh, half-educated accent contrasting sharply with Halifax's soft, elegant tones. "Now we come down to it. If you need us in the war, if you need us to lick the USA for you, why the hell won't you tell us what all you know about uranium bombs? We've got our own project going-you can bet your bottom dollar on that. But if you give us a hand, it helps you and us both. Sooner we start blowing the damnyankees sky-high, the happier everybody'll be. Except them, I mean."

Halifax's bony face never showed much; he would have made a dangerous poker player. But his eyebrows rose a fraction now. Maybe he hadn't expected Jake to be so direct. If he hadn't, he didn't know the President of the Confederate States as well as he thought he did.

"Uranium is an extremely delicate subject," he said at last.

"Tell me about it!" Featherston exclaimed. "Even so, you think the United States aren't working on a bomb of their own? Suppose they get it before we do. They'll blast Richmond off the map, and New Orleans, and Atlanta-"

"Assuming Atlanta hasn't fallen by then," Halifax said.

Fuck you, Charlie. Featherston almost said it, and diplomacy be damned. At the last instant, he bit his tongue. What he did say was, "Yeah, well, suppose they knock us out of the war. Then what? How long before London goes up in smoke? About as long as it takes to get a bomb across the ocean."

Lord Halifax looked physically ill. "The United States aren't our only worry on that score," he choked out.

"I know. Damn Germans started this whole mess. Somebody should've strangled that Einstein bastard when he was a baby." Jake scowled. "Too late to get all hot and bothered about it now. Look, I don't even know how far along you guys are. Maybe we're ahead of you."

The British ambassador winced, ever so slightly. Ah, that got him, Jake thought with an internal grin. The mere idea that backward half-colonials across the sea could get ahead of the high and mighty lords of creation on their own foggy island had to rankle.

To make sure it did, Jake added, "After all, we're a long ways ahead of you when it comes to rockets. Ask the Yankees if you don't believe me."

Halifax winced again, more obviously this time. Jake Featherston's internal grin got wider. "Quite," Halifax muttered: a one-word admission of pain.

"Reckon we can work a swap?" Jake asked. "We'll tell you what we know. We're not afraid of our allies. If you want to shoot rockets at the Germans, more power to you. Blow 'em to hell and gone. I won't shed a tear, and you can bet your…backside on that."

"An interesting proposal," the ambassador said. "I am not authorized to agree to it, but I shall put it to the Prime Minister. If he deems it feasible, we can proceed from there."

"How long will that take?"

"My dear sir!" Lord Halifax spread his hands. "That's in Winston's court, I'm afraid, not mine. I will say he is not a man in the habit of brooking delay."

Featherston wondered if they really did speak the same language. He thought he understood what the British ambassador meant, but he wasn't sure. Hoping he did, he answered, "He'd better not wait around. You're in trouble, and so are we. The more we can help each other, the better our chances, right?"

"One could hardly disagree," Halifax said.

"Fair enough." But Jake wasn't smiling. He was scowling. "Thing you've got to remember is, this cuts both ways. You want what we know about rockets-any fool can see you do. You want to get, but you don't want to give. And I'm here to tell you, your Lordship, sir, that ain't gonna fly."

Lord Halifax was a diplomat. If Featherston's bluntness offended him, he didn't let on. "I assure you, Mr. President, I intend to make your views plain to the Prime Minister. What happens after that is up to him."

Jake knew perfectly well he would have the hide of any Confederate ambassador who exceeded his authority. In fairness, he couldn't blame Winston Churchill for feeling the same way. But his definition of fairness was simple. If he got what he wanted, that was fair. Anything less, and the other side was holding out on him.

Most of the time, he admired Churchill. Like him, the Prime Minister had spent much too long as a voice crying in the wilderness. In a way, Churchill had a tougher job than he did. Britain needed to worry about fighting both the USA and the German Empire.

But Britain hadn't been invaded the last time around. She hadn't been disarmed and had to start over. All she'd lost was Ireland-and the way the Irish felt about their longtime overlords meant she might be better off without it. With Ireland gone, the British didn't have to worry about keeping the lid on a country where a third of the population hated the guts of the other two-thirds. Ireland was under British control now, to keep the USA from using it as a forward base, but military occupation had a whole different set of rules. The limeys weren't as tough on the micks as the Freedom Party was on Confederate Negroes, but they didn't take any crap, either.

"Tell him not to wait around, that's all," Jake said. "For his sake and ours."

"Winston is a great many things, but not a ditherer. He may from time to time find himself mistaken. He hardly ever finds himself unsure," Halifax said. "I do not know what his answer will be. I am confident you will have it in short order."

"Good. Anything else?" Jake was no ditherer, either.

"The United States are making a good deal of propaganda capital from that camp they captured in Texas," Lord Halifax said. "Did you have to be quite so open in your destruction of the colored populace?"

"You know what, Your Excellency? I don't give a shit how much the damnyankees squawk about that." Jake wasn't being truthful, but he didn't care. He had to make the limey understand. "What we do inside our own country is nobody's business but ours. We've had a nigger problem for hundreds of years-even before we broke away from England. Now I'm finally doing something about it, and I really don't care who doesn't like that. We're going to come out of this war nigger-free, or as close to nigger-free as I can make us."

"Your solution is…heroic," Halifax said.

Jake liked that better than the British ambassador probably intended. He felt like a hero for reducing the CSA's colored population. "I keep my campaign promises, by God," he said.

"No one has ever doubted your determination." Lord Halifax got to his feet. "If you will excuse me…" He left the President's office.

When Lulu looked in after Halifax was gone, Jake Featherston asked, "Who's next?"

"Mr. Goldman, sir."

"Send him in, send him in."

Saul Goldman had grown bald and pudgy in the twenty-odd years Jake had known him. That had nothing to do with anything. The little Jew still made a damned effective Director of Communications. Because he did, he could speak his mind to the President, or come closer than most of the glad-handing yes-men who surrounded Featherston.

"I don't know how I can present any more losses in Georgia," he said now. "People will know I'm whistling in the dark no matter what I say."

"Then don't say anything," Jake answered. "Just say the Yankees are spewing out a pack of lies-and they are-and let it go at that."

Goldman cocked his head to one side, considering. "It could work…for a while. But if Atlanta falls, sir, it's a propaganda disaster."

"If Atlanta falls, it's a fucking military disaster, and the hell with propaganda," Featherston said. "I don't think that'll happen any time soon." He hoped he wasn't whistling in the dark. The news from Georgia was bad, and getting worse despite the fall rains.

"You know more about that than I do. I'm not a general, and I don't pretend to be," Goldman said.

"Don't know why the hell not," Jake told him. "Seems like every damn fool in the country wants to tell me how to run the war. Why should you be any different?" He held up a hand. "I know why-you aren't a damn fool."

"I try not to be, anyhow," Goldman said.

"You do pretty well. Half of being smart is knowing what you're not smart at," Jake said. "Plenty of folks reckon that 'cause they know something, they know everything. And that ain't the way it works."

"I never said it was," Goldman answered primly.

"Yeah, I know," Jake said. "You make one."

A s far as Irving Morrell knew, he was unique among U.S. generals, with the possible exception of a few big brains high up in the General Staff. His colleagues thought about winning battles. After they won one, if they did, they worried about the next one.

Morrell was different. He thought about smashing the Confederate States of America flat. To him, that was the goal. Battles were nothing in themselves. They were just the means he needed to reach that end.

Back when the CSA still had soldiers in Ohio, he'd drawn a slashing line on the map, one that ran from Kentucky through Tennessee and Georgia to the Atlantic. That was where he was going now. He aimed to cut the Confederacy in half. Once he did, he figured the Confederate States would do what anything cut in half did.

They would die.

The question uppermost in his mind now was simple: could he go on to the ocean without bothering to capture Atlanta first? Would the enemy die fast enough afterwards to make the risk worthwhile?

He pondered a map. The chart was tacked to the wall of what had been a dentist's office in Monroe, Georgia, more than fifty miles east of Atlanta. He would have used the mayor's office, but a direct hit from a 105 left it draftier than he liked.

Monroe had had a couple of big cotton-processing plants, both of them now rubble. It had had a couple of fine houses that dated back to the days before the War of Secession, both of them now burnt. War had never come to this part of the CSA before. It was here now, and it made itself at home.

Reluctantly, Morrell decided Atlanta would have to fall before he stormed east again. It gave the enemy too good a base for launching a counteroffensive against his flank if he ignored it. Too many roads and railroads ran through the place. He couldn't be sure enough his air power would keep them all out of commission to ignore it. Taking chances was one thing. Taking stupid chances was something else again.

He didn't want to charge right into the city. He aimed to envelop it instead. That way, the Confederates couldn't do unto him as the USA did unto them in Pittsburgh. An attacking army that took a city block by block put its own dick in the meat grinder and turned the crank.

No help would come to Atlanta from the north or the east, and the bulk of the CSA's strength lay in those directions. The Confederate States were like a snail. They had a hard shell that protected them from the United States. Once you broke through, though, you found they were soft and squishy underneath. How much could they bring in from Florida or Alabama? Not nearly enough-or Morrell didn't think so, anyhow.

Back when he first proposed his slash, the General Staff estimated it would take two years, not one. When Chattanooga fell, he'd hoped to prove them wrong. He might yet, but racing ahead for the sake of speed wasn't smart.

"Then don't do it," he muttered, and headed out of the office. On the floor lay the dentist's diploma from Tulane University, the glass in the frame shattered. Morrell wondered whether the man was still practicing in Monroe or had put on a butternut uniform and gone up toward the front.

Two black men carrying rifles stalked along the street. They wore armbands with USA on them. White civilians fell over themselves getting out of their way. They waved and nodded to Morrell: not quite salutes, but close enough. He nodded back. The Negro guerrillas made him nervous, too. But they scared white Confederates to death, which was good, and they knew more about what was going on here than U.S. troops did, which was even better.

Sometimes they shot first, without bothering to ask questions later. Morrell was sure they'd killed a few people who didn't deserve killing. But how many Negroes who didn't deserve killing were dead all across the CSA? A little extra revenge might be too bad, but Morrell didn't intend to lose any sleep about it.

Except for guerrillas, not many Negroes were left in and around Monroe, or anywhere U.S. armies had reached. White people seemed to suffer from a kind of collective amnesia. More often than not, they denied there'd ever been many blacks close by. In Kentucky, they said the Negroes mostly lived in Tennessee. In Tennessee, they said the Negroes mostly lived in Georgia. Here in Georgia, they pointed two ways at once: towards Alabama and South Carolina. Was that selective blindness, a guilty conscience, or both? Morrell would have bet on both.

"Young man!" A Confederate dowager swept down on him. "I need to speak to you, young man!"

Morrell almost looked over his shoulder to see whom she meant. He'd passed fifty a couple of years before, and his weather-beaten features didn't seem young even to himself. But her gray hair and the turkeylike wattles under her chin said she was some distance ahead of him. "What can I do for you, ma'am?" he asked, as politely as he could.

"Young man, I know you come from the United States, and so are ignorant of a good deal of proper behavior, but I must tell you that colored people are not permitted to go armed in this country," she said.

He looked at her. He did his best to look through her. "They are now."

"By whose authority?" she demanded.

"Mine." He tapped the stars on his shoulder strap.

"You should be ashamed of yourself, in that case," she said.

Of itself, his hand dropped to the.45 he wore on his belt. "Lady, I think you better get lost before I blow your stupid head off," he said. "You people did your best to murder every Negro you could catch, and you have the gall to talk to me about shame…There's not a word low enough for you."

"The nerve!" The matron flounced off. Reality hadn't set in for her. He wondered if it ever would, or could.

Over in Texas, General Dowling had taken local big shots through the Confederate death camp and into the mass graveyard so they could see with their own eyes what their country had done. Some of them had the decency to kill themselves afterwards. Others just went on the way they had before.

Morrell wished he had one of those camps to show the locals. Then they wouldn't be able to shrug and pretend there'd never been that many Negroes in this part of the CSA. But he feared the matron wouldn't be much impressed afterwards. She was one of those people for whom nothing seemed real if it didn't happen to her.

Somebody'd painted YANKS OUT! on a wall. Morrell grabbed the first soldier he saw. "Get some paint and grab a couple of these assholes and have 'em clean this shit up," he told the man in green-gray. "If they give you a hard time, do whatever you have to do to get 'em to pay attention."

"Yes, sir!" the soldier said, and went off to take care of it with a grin on his face.

Artillery rumbled, off to the northeast. Morrell cocked his head to one side, listening, gauging. Those were Confederate guns. The enemy was still trying to blunt the U.S. attack and drive Morrell's forces back. He didn't think Featherston's men could do it. Before long, counterbattery fire or air strikes would make those C.S. gun bunnies sorry they'd ever been born, and even sorrier they'd tried messing with the U.S. Army.

From what Morrell had seen, the only thing Confederate civilians were sorry about was that their army hadn't done a better job of keeping the damnyankees away. Somehow, that left him imperfectly sympathetic.

"General!" Another woman called to him. This one was young and blond and pretty, pretty enough to remind him how long he'd been away from Agnes. She also looked mad enough to spit nails.

"Yes?" He'd give her the benefit of the doubt as long as he could.

"Those niggers of yours!" she snapped.

"What about 'em?" Morrell didn't want them getting out of hand and raping all the women they could catch. He could understand why they'd want to. He could sympathize, too. But he wasn't running a mob. He was running an army, or trying to.

"They looked at me. They leered at me, the grinning apes," the blond woman said. "You ought to string them up and horsewhip them."

Morrell needed a moment to realize she was dead serious. When he did, he almost wished the Negroes had dragged her into an alley and done their worst. "That's not how things'll work from here on out, so you'd better get used to it," he said. "Nobody gets whipped for looking. Heck, I'm looking right now. You're worth looking at, no offense."

"Well, of course." As pretty women often did, she took her good looks for granted. "But I don't mind it from you-too much. You're a Yankee, but you're not a nigger."

"If they touch you and you don't like it, you can complain. If anybody touches you and you don't like it, you can complain," Morrell said. "But they can look as much as they want."

"You mean you won't do anything about it?" The blond woman sounded as if she couldn't believe her ears. She looked disgusted, almost nauseated.

"That's what I said," Morrell told her.

"You damnyankees really are animals, then." She pursed her lips, perhaps getting ready to spit at him.

"If you do anything stupid," he said, "you'll find out just what kind of animal I am. You won't like it-I promise."

He didn't shout and bluster. That had never been his style. He didn't need to. He sounded like a man who meant exactly what he said, and for a good reason: he was. The local woman stopped looking like somebody saving up spit. She did look a little deflated. Then she gathered herself, flung, "Nigger-lover!" in his face instead of saliva, and stalked off. Fury gave her a fine hip action. Morrell admired it. He was sure the Negro auxiliaries had, too.

Up till now, he hadn't had much use for Negroes. Few whites in the USA did. Had he seen a couple of black men staring at a white woman's butt on a street corner in, say, Indianapolis, that might have offended him. In Monroe, Georgia? No. In fact, he smiled. The enemies of his enemies were his friends, all right.

After dark, Confederate bombers came over Monroe and dropped explosives on the U.S. soldiers in and around the town-and on their own people. A thin layer of low clouds hung above Monroe, so the Confederates might as well have been bombing blind. They couldn't come over by day, not unless they wanted to get slaughtered. In their shoes, Morrell supposed he would have preferred bombing blind to not bombing at all, too.

He had a few minutes' warning from Y-ranging gear that spotted the approaching bombers and sounded the alarm before they started unloading. U.S. night fighters were also starting to carry Y-ranging sets. So far, those sets were neither very strong nor very easy to use, but they were already making night operations more expensive for the CSA. Pretty soon, electronics might make nighttime raids as risky as daylight ones.

Crouching in a trench with bombs crashing down around him, Morrell could see a day where neither side on a battlefield would be able to hide anything from the other. How would you fight a war then? You could be so strong you'd beat your enemy even if he did see what you had in mind. You could, yes, but it wouldn't be easy, or economical.

Or you could make him think all your fancy preparations meant one thing and then go and do something else instead. Morrell nodded to himself. If he had his druthers, he would play it that way. If the enemy kept staring at the cape, he wouldn't see the sword till too late. You saved your own men and matйriel that way…if you could bring it off.

The all-clear warbled. Morrell got out of the trench and went back to his cot. He didn't know how much damage the Confederates had done. Probably some-probably not a lot. Without a doubt, they'd screwed a lot of U.S. soldiers out of a night's sleep. That counted, too, though no civilians who hadn't got up groggy after an air raid would think so. Morrell yawned. His eyes closed. Air raid or not, the Confederates didn't screw him out of more than forty-five minutes.

J onathan Moss had been on the run ever since a tornado let him break out of the Andersonville POW camp. Joining Spartacus' band of Negro guerrillas had kept the Confederates from getting him (it had also kept the guerrillas from shooting him and Nick Cantarella). But joining them also ensured that he stayed on the run.

U.S. forces weren't far away now. The rumble of artillery and the thud of bursting bombs came from the north by day and night. Running off to the troops from his own side would have been easy as pie…if not for God only knew how many divisions' worth of Jake Featherston's finest between him and them.

"We gots to sit tight," Spartacus told his men-again and again, a sure sign they didn't want to listen to him. "We gots to. Pretty soon, the Yankees, they comes to us. Then we is free men fo' true. We is free at las'."

Moss and Cantarella caught each other's eye. Moss doubted it would be so simple. By the New York infantry officer's raised eyebrow, so did he.

And, however much they wished they weren't, they turned out to be right. For a long time, the countryside a hundred miles south of Atlanta had been a military backwater: peanut farms and cotton fields, patrolled-when they were patrolled-by halfhearted Mexican soldiers and by militiamen whose stamina and skill didn't match their zeal. Good guerrilla country, in other words.

No more. With the U.S. irruption into northern Georgia, with the threat to Atlanta, southern Georgia suddenly turned into a military zone. Encampments and supply dumps sprouted like toadstools after a rain. Truck convoys and trains brought supplies and soldiers up toward the front.

All that gave Spartacus' band and the other black guerrillas still operating chances they'd never had before. If they mined a road and delayed a column of trucks, if they sprayed machine-gun bullets at a tent city in the middle of the night, they really hurt the Confederate war effort. From everything Jonathan Moss gathered from the news and rumors he picked up, the Confederate States couldn't afford even fleabites on their backside. They already had too much trouble right in front of them.

The enemy seemed to feel the same way. When Spartacus' guerrillas did strike, the men in butternut went after them with a ferocity they hadn't seen before. If Spartacus hadn't been fighting in country he knew better than the enemy did, the Confederates would have wiped out his band in short order. As things were, his men scrambled from woods to swamp, half a jump ahead of their pursuers.

Moss developed a new appreciation for possum and squirrel and turtle. The Negroes called one kind of long-necked terrapin, chicken turtles, presumably because of how they tasted. Moss couldn't see the resemblance. He didn't spend much time bitching, though; any meat in his belly was better than none.

Looking down at what was left of himself one weary evening, he said, "Back before the war, I had a potbelly. One of these days, I'd like to get another one."

"Some of the shit we eat makes Army rations look good," Nick Cantarella agreed. "Don't know that I could say anything worse about it."

Amusement glinted in Spartacus' eyes as he looked from one white man to the other. "I's mighty sorry to inconvenience you gents-mighty sorry," he said. "If 'n you knows where we kin git us some ribs and beefsteaks, sing out."

"Steak! Jesus!" Cantarella started to laugh. "I even stopped thinking about steak. What the hell's the point?"

"How about Confederate rations?" Spartacus asked, the mockery gone from his voice.

Hearing the change in tone, Moss grew alert. "What do you have in mind, boss?" he asked.

Spartacus smiled; he liked hearing the white men in his band acknowledge that he outranked them. "They got that new depot over by Americus," he said.

"Think we can hit it?" Cantarella asked.

"Hope so, anyways," Spartacus answered. "I got me a pretty good notion where they keeps the ration tins, too. See, here's what I got in mind…"

He sketched on the muddy ground with a stick. He wouldn't have done so much explaining for the other Negroes, but he thought of the escaped U.S. soldiers as military professionals, and valued their opinion. With Nick Cantarella, that was justified. Moss knew it was a lot less so for him.

He listened to Spartacus and tried to look wise. Cantarella, sure as hell, had a couple of suggestions that made the guerrilla leader nod in admiration. "Yeah, we do dat," Spartacus said. "We sure 'nough do dat. Featherston's fuckers, dey don't know which way dey should oughta run."

"That's the idea," Cantarella said. "If they go in a bunch of wrong directions, the right one gets easier for us."

The guerrillas struck at night. They stayed under cover while the sun was in the sky. Doing anything else would have asked to get slaughtered. A Negro threw a grenade into the depot from the north, while another black banged away with a Tredegar-trying to stir up the anthill.

They did it, too. Whistles shrilled. Men shouted. Soldiers boiled out after the Negroes. Moss hoped the guerrillas had splendid hidey-holes or quick legs.

As soon as the Confederates were well and truly stirred, the guerrillas' machine gun opened up from the west. Nick Cantarella had finally persuaded the gunner to fire short bursts and not squeeze off a belt of ammo at a time. It made the weapon much more effective and much more accurate.

Somebody inside the supply dump yelled, "Let's get those coons, goddammit! They come around here, they give us the chance to wreck 'em. We better not waste it." Shouted orders followed. The officer-he plainly was one-knew what he was doing, and how to get his men to do what he wanted.

A scream said at least one machine-gun bullet struck home. The Confederates fired back. They also started moving against the machine gun. A few black riflemen posted near the guerrillas' heavy weapon discouraged that. They were more mobile than the machine-gun crew, and gave the C.S. attackers some unpleasant surprises.

But the big surprise the guerrillas had in mind came from the far side of the supply depot. As soon as the Confederates were well engaged to the west, Spartacus whistled to the rest of the band and said, "Let's go!"

As it always did when he went into action, Jonathan Moss' heart pounded. He clutched his Tredegar and loped forward. Cutters snipped through the strands of barbed wire around the depot. The supply dump was new and in a rear area. The Confederates hadn't had the time or energy to protect it the way they would have closer to the front.

"No shootin' here, remember-not unless you got to," Spartacus called quietly. "In an' out fast as you can, like you was screwin' with her pappy asleep right beside you." From the way some of the Negroes chuckled, they'd done things like that.

Most of them carried rifles or pistols or submachine guns. Three or four, though, pushed wheelbarrows instead. Moss couldn't imagine a homelier weapon of war. But a man with a wheelbarrow could move much more food than someone who had to carry a crate in his arms or on his back.

"What the hell?" a Confederate called-the Negroes weren't quiet enough to escape all notice.

"We're on patrol here," Moss said, doing his best to imitate a Southern accent. "Why the devil aren't you chasing those damn niggers?"

"Uh-on my way, sir."

Moss heard rapidly retreating footsteps. He knew he'd better not laugh out loud. In his own ears, he hadn't sounded much like a Confederate at all. But he had sounded like a white man, and the soldier never dreamt he'd run into a damnyankee here. To him, anybody who sounded like a white had to be on his side, and anybody who sounded like an authoritative white had to be entitled to order him around.

"How d'you like being a Confederate officer?" Nick Cantarella whispered.

"Fine, except the bastards don't pay me," Moss whispered back.

"Hell they don't," Spartacus said. "We's at the payoff now. In there, boys-grab an' git!"

The Negroes rushed into the tent that sheltered crates of rations from the elements. Soft thumps announced that several of those crates were going into the wheelbarrows. The guerrillas emerged, their grins the most visible thing about them.

Then a shot rang out. "Jesus God, we got chicken thieves!" a Confederate screamed.

One of the chicken thieves shot him an instant later. "Scram!" Spartacus said-surely the most succinct order Moss had ever heard. It was also just right for the circumstances.

Firing as they went, the guerrillas withdrew from the depot. Men with rifles and submachine guns covered the wheelbarrows' retreat. When a bullet struck home with a wet slapping sound, a hauler dropped. Nick Cantarella grabbed the wheelbarrow handles and got it moving again.

They made it out of the supply dump and back into the woods. Moss' greatest worry was that the Confederates would pursue hard, but they didn't. "Shit, they already did more than I figured they would," Cantarella said. "They're rear-echelon troops, clerks and stevedores in uniform. If they wanted to mix it up, they'd be at the front."

"I guess," Moss said. "I'm not complaining, believe me."

Cantarella gave him the ghost of a grin. "Didn't think you were. That was smart, what you did there to keep the one asshole off our ass."

"Thanks." Praise from the other Army officer always made Moss feel good. It made him feel like a real soldier, not a pilot stuck in the middle of a ground war he didn't understand-which he was.

Once the guerrillas got clear of the depot, Spartacus abandoned the wheelbarrows. His men grumbled, but he held firm. "Gotta do it," he said. "Otherwise, them wheels show the butternut bastards every place we been. Trail's a lot harder to get rid of than footprints."

Moss and Cantarella took their turns playing pack mule along with everybody else. White skin gave them no special privileges here. If they'd tried to claim any, they wouldn't have lasted long. Moss wondered whether Confederates caught in like circumstances would have been smart enough to figure that out. After some of the things he'd seen in Georgia, he wouldn't have bet on it.

His back grumbled at lugging-toting, they said down here-a heavy crate. He was the oldest man in the guerrilla band. Spartacus, who'd been a Confederate noncom in the Great War, was within a couple of years of him, but Spartacus was the CO. Nobody expected him to fetch and carry.

After what seemed like forever, the Negroes and the U.S. soldiers they'd taken in got back to the swampy hideout from which they'd started. And then…to the victors went the spoils. "Let's eat!" Spartacus said, and they did.

C.S. military rations were nothing to write home about. In truces to pick up wounded men, Confederate soldiers traded tobacco and coffee to their U.S. counterparts for canned goods made in the USA. And U.S. rations, as Moss knew too well, wouldn't put the Waldorf out of business any time soon.

But greasy hash and salty stew filled the belly. Moss' had rubbed up against his backbone too often lately. He was amazed at how many tins of meat he could bolt down before he even started getting full.

"Man, I feel like I swallowed a medicine ball," Nick Cantarella said after a while.

"Yeah, me, too," Moss said. "I like it."

He lit a cigarette, the way he might have after a fine meal in a fancy restaurant. He'd had plenty to eat, and nobody was shooting at him right this minute. How could life get any better?

C incinnatus Driver wanted to strut through the streets of Ellijay, Georgia. Strutting wasn't in the cards when you walked with a cane and a limp, but he felt like it anyway. How could a black man from the USA not want to strut in a little town his country had taken away from the Confederacy?

Here I am! he felt like shouting. What are you ofay bastards gonna do about it? And the whites of Ellijay couldn't do one damn thing, not unless they wanted the U.S. Army to land on them with both feet.

The hamlet seemed pleasant enough, with a grassy town square centered on a rock fountain. Groves of apple and peach trees grew nearby; Cincinnatus had heard the trout and bass fishing in the nearby stream was first-rate. Ellijay probably made a nice place to live…for whites.

Whenever the locals saw Cincinnatus, though, the way they acted gave him the chills. They stared at him as if he were a rare animal in a zoo-a passenger pigeon come back to life, say. They hadn't thought any Negroes were left in these parts, and didn't bother hiding their surprise.

"What're you doin' here?" a gray-haired man in bib overalls asked around an enormous chaw.

"Drivin' a truck for the United States of America," Cincinnatus answered proudly. "Helping the Army blow all this Confederate white trash to hell and gone."

He thought the Georgian would swallow the cud of tobacco. "You can't talk that way! You ought to be strung up, you know that?"

Along with his cane, Cincinnatus carried a submachine gun some Confederate soldier would never need again. He gestured with it. "You try, Uncle, an' it's the last dumb thing you ever do."

"Uncle? Uncle?" That pissed the white man off as much as Cincinnatus hoped it would. It was what Confederate whites called Negroes too old to get called boy. Throwing it in the local's face felt wonderful. "You can't speak to me that way! I'll talk to your officer, by God, and he'll teach you respect."

Cincinnatus laughed in his face. "You're the enemy, Uncle, and we done beat you. We don't need to waste respect on the likes of you."

Muttering under his breath, the local stomped off. Cincinnatus hoped he did complain to an Army officer. That would serve him right-wouldn't it just? Cincinnatus tried to imagine what the officer would tell him. He couldn't, not in detail, but it would boil down to, Tough shit, buddy. Now fuck off and leave me alone. He was sure of that.

Technically, Cincinnatus wasn't even in the Army. The U.S. Navy accepted Negroes, but the Army didn't-though he'd heard talk that that might change. If it did, it would matter to his son, but not to him. He was both overage and not in any kind of shape to pass a physical.

But he could still drive a truck. A lot of drivers were overage civilians, many of them with not quite disabling wounds from the Great War. They freed up younger, fitter men to go to the front and fight. And, when Confederate bushwhackers hit them, they showed they still knew what to do with weapons in their hands, too.

When Cincinnatus first volunteered to drive after getting back to U.S. territory, he'd carried a.45. He patted the ugly, functional submachine gun with almost the affection he might have shown his wife. Elizabeth had got him out of some tough spots, and so had the captured Confederate piece. And it didn't talk back.

U.S. 105s north of Ellijay thundered to life. Somebody-a spotter in a light airplane, maybe-must have seen Confederates up to something. With luck, the guns would disrupt whatever it was. Before long, Confederate artillery would probably open up, too, and maim or kill a few U.S. soldiers. Always plenty of fresh meat on both sides in war.

U.S. forces might push farther east from Ellijay, but they were unlikely to go farther north soon. They held this part of Georgia mostly to keep the enemy from bringing reinforcements down towards Atlanta. They didn't want any more of it-they were shield, not sword.

The drivers guarded their own trucks. Several men who weren't on sentry duty sat around a liberated card table playing poker. Soldiers probably would have sat on the ground, but it wasn't comfortable for geezers with old wounds and assorted other aches and pains. Green U.S. bills and brown C.S. banknotes went into the pot. They had good-natured arguments-and some not so good-natured-about what Confederate money was worth. Right now, in the drivers' highly unofficial rate of exchange, one green dollar bought about $2.75 in brown paper.

"Call," Hal Williamson said. A moment later, Cincinnatus' friend swore as his three sevens lost to a nine-high straight.

"Come to papa." The other driver raked in the pot.

Williamson got to his feet. "Well, that's about as much money as I can afford to lose till Uncle Sam gives me some more," he said.

One of the kibitzers sat down in the folding chair he'd vacated and pulled out a fat bankroll of green and brown. "I'm not here to lose money," he announced. "I'm gonna win me some more."

"Emil's here. We can start now," another poker player said. The guy with the roll flipped him off. The other man turned to Cincinnatus. "How about you, buddy? Got any jack that's burning a hole in your pocket?"

"Nope," Cincinnatus said. "Don't play often enough to get good at it. Don't like playin' enough to get good at it. So why should I throw my money down the toilet?"

"On account of I got grandkids who need shoes?" suggested the man sitting at the card table. "We need suckers in this here game-besides Emil, I mean."

"You'll see who's a sucker," Emil said. "You'll be sorry when you do, too."

"If you're no good at somethin', why do it?" Cincinnatus said.

"Well, there's always fucking," the other driver replied, which got a laugh.

"Maybe you ain't no good at that," Cincinnatus said, which got a bigger one. "Me, though, I know what I'm doin' there."

"That's telling him," Williamson said.

Cincinnatus' answering grin was crooked. Even his buddies seemed surprised when he held his own in banter or didn't turn cowardly when he got shot at or generally acted like a man instead of the way they thought a nigger would act. It might have been funny if it weren't so sad. These were U.S. citizens, men from a country where Negroes mostly had the same legal rights as anybody else, and they thought-or at least felt down deep somewhere-he ought to be a stupid buffoon.

What about white people in the Confederate States? His mouth tightened, the grin disappearing altogether. He knew the answer to that, knew it much too well. They thought Negroes were so far below ordinary human beings that they got rid of them without a qualm. And what would the local in overalls say about that? He'd probably say the Confederacy's Negroes had it coming.

"Fuck him, too," Cincinnatus muttered.

"Who? Dolf there?" Williamson nodded toward the poker player who'd gone back and forth with Cincinnatus. "What'd he do to you?"

"No, not Dolf. This peckerhead redneck I was talkin' with in town," Cincinnatus answered, not even noticing he was tarring the Confederate with the same kind of brush whites in the CSA used against blacks. "He reckoned I was uppity. If I was really uppity, I would've plugged the son of a bitch."

"Probably no great loss," Williamson said. "We're gonna have to kill a lot of these Confederate assholes to scare the rest into leaving us alone." Again, Confederate whites might have talked about Negroes the same way.

The next morning, soldiers loaded crates of 105mm shells into the back of Cincinnatus' truck. The convoy of which he was a part rattled north to replenish the guns that had been firing at the Confederates the day before. The artillery position was only a few miles away. Even so, a halftrack and three armored cars came along with the trucks. No one inside Ellijay seemed eager to take on the assembled might of the U.S. Army, but things were different out in the countryside. It seethed with rebellion.

Two bushwhackers fired from the undergrowth that grew too close to the side of the road before the convoy got halfway to where it was going. One bullet shattered a truck's windshield. Another flattened a tire. The armored cars sprayed the bushes with machine-gun fire. Cincinnatus hadn't seen any muzzle flashes. He would have bet the soldiers in the armored cars hadn't, either.

One of those cars stayed behind to help the truck driver with the flat change his tire-and to shield him from more bullets while he worked. Cincinnatus hoped the driver would be all right. He had to keep going himself. He wished a barrel with a flail were preceding the convoy. That way, it would probably blow up any land mines before they blew up people. As things were…

As things were, they didn't run into-or over-any. Cincinnatus figured the convoy was lucky. He also figured it had no guarantee of being lucky again on the way back. Who could guess what holdouts or stubborn civilians were doing while nobody in a green-gray uniform could see them?

Gun bunnies unloaded the crates. "We'll give 'em hell," one of them promised. Cincinnatus nodded, but the artillerymen couldn't do anything about the enemies likeliest to hurt him.

He wished he could stay by the gun pits. Bushwhackers didn't come around here. But then, as he was driving back towards Ellijay, he heard thunder behind him. A glance in the rear-view mirror told him the artillerymen were catching it. Wherever you went, whatever you did, the war would reach out and grab you and bite you.

Snipers fired a few shots at the trucks on the way back to the depot. When they got there, one of the drivers said, "You guys are gonna have to help me out of the cab. They got me in the knee."

"Jesus, Gordie, how come you ain't screamin' your head off?" another driver asked. "How the hell'd you make it back?"

Gordie started laughing to beat the band. "On account of I lost that leg in 1915," he answered. "Fuckers ruined the joint in my artificial one, but that's about it."

"How'd you work the clutch without your knee joint?" Cincinnatus asked.

"Grabbed the leg with my hand and mashed down on the sucker," Gordie said. "Wasn't pretty. Don't figure I did my gear train any good. But who gives a damn? I made it back. 'Course, the leg's just a piece of junk without that joint. Better find me a wheelchair or some crutches-I ain't goin' anywhere without 'em."

Cincinnatus had a lot of parts that didn't work as well as they should have. He wasn't out-and-out missing any, though, and he never would have imagined that losing a leg could prove lucky for anybody. If they'd already got you there once, they couldn't do it again.

The supply dump stocked both wheelchairs and crutches. That didn't surprise Cincinnatus, although it saddened him. Maimed men were a by-product of war. The powers that be understood as much.

Gordie's leg went out for repairs. Technicians who dealt with such things were also necessary. When it came back, the amputee was full of praise. "Feels like I just got new spark plugs on my Ford," he said. "Joint's smoother and easier to work than it ever was before, I think. Quieter, too." He still walked with a rolling gait like a drunken sailor's, but so did anybody who'd lost a leg above the knee. The roll locked the joint till the next step. Cincinnatus also thought the artificial leg was quieter now than it had been.

Except for harassing fire as he drove his routes, everything seemed pretty quiet. He'd drifted into a backwater of the war. Part of him wanted to be doing more. The rest-the larger portion-thought that part was out of its tree.