In At the Death

VII

When Cassius walked down the street, white people scurried out of his way. That still thrilled him. It had never happened before he started this occupation duty. His whole life long, he'd been taught to move aside for whites. Dreadful things happened to colored people who didn't.

Now he had a Tredegar in his hands and the U.S. Army at his back. Anybody who didn't like that-and there were bound to be people who didn't-and was rash enough to let him know it could end up suddenly dead, and no one would say a word. Other members of Gracchus' band had shot whites in Madison for any reason or none, and then gone about their business. Oh, the ofays in town flabbled, but who paid attention to them? Not a soul.

White women were particularly quick not just to get out of the way but to get out of sight. Cassius had seen that ever since he got here. Shooting wasn't the only revenge Negroes could take on their former social superiors. Oh, no-not at all.

Cassius scowled when he saw blue X's painted on walls. Those would come down or get painted over in a hurry-they were shorthand for C.S. battle flags. If a property owner didn't cover them up, U.S. soldiers would assume he was a Confederate sympathizer. They'd probably be right, too. Right or wrong, they'd make him sorry.

More than a few whites had already disappeared from Madison. The U.S. Army said they'd gone into prisons farther from the front. Negroes loudly insisted the U.S. soldiers had shipped them to camps. Cassius had done it himself. He wanted the ofays quivering in their boots. They'd made him quiver too damn long.

They'd made him fight back, too. Tales of horror like that were liable to make the local whites fight back. Cassius didn't care. If the ofays wanted to try, they could. He figured the U.S. Army would start massacring them then.

And he would get to help.

He came to a street corner at the same time as another Negro marching from a different direction. "Mornin', Sertorius," he said. "How you doin'?"

"I's tolerable," his fellow guerrilla replied. "How 'bout yourself?"

"Could be worse," Cassius admitted. "We got us plenty o' grub, we got warm places to sleep, an' we got all the Yankees on our side. Yeah, sure enough could be worse."

"Amen," Sertorius said, as if Cassius were a preacher. "Couple months ago, things was worse." He wore a U.S. helmet, and made as if to tip it. Cassius returned the gesture with the cap he had on. "See you," Sertorius added, and went on marching his assigned route.

"See you." Cassius also walked on. Odds were they would see each other at the end of the day. They weren't living in fear, the way they had when they skulked and hid in the countryside. The ofays feared them now. Cassius liked that better. Who wouldn't?

And sometimes the ofays were starting to treat them with respect. A kid maybe eight or nine years old came up to Cassius. "Got any rations you can spare?" he asked, his voice most polite.

Cassius would have told a grown man to go to hell. A skinny kid, though, was a skinny kid. Cassius started to reach for one of the ration cans in his belt pouch. Then he took another look at the boy. His hand stopped. "You called me a goddamn nigger before," he said. "You said I sucked the damnyankees' dicks. Far as I'm concerned, you kin starve."

The white boy looked almost comically astonished. "I didn't mean it," he said, and smiled a winning smile.

How dumb was he? How dumb did he think Cassius was? That was the real question, and Cassius knew the answer-dumb as a nigger, that was what he thought. "Now tell me one I'll believe," Cassius said scornfully.

If looks could have killed, he would have fallen over dead on the spot. The white kid started to say something-probably something as sweet and charming as the insults he'd dealt out the last time he ran into Cassius. Then he glanced at the Tredegar and went away instead. That was the smartest thing he could have done. Cassius likely would have shot him if he'd run his mouth twice.

An old man came up behind him. "You won't even feed a little boy?" the geezer asked. "What's the world coming to?"

"I ain't gonna feed that little bastard no matter what the world's comin' to," Cassius answered. "Some other kid, maybe, but not him."

"Why not?"

"On account of he done called me a nigger and a cocksucker."

Well, you are a nigger. Cassius could see it in the old white man's shrewd gray eyes. The fellow had sense enough not to say it, though. And cocksucker was an insult to anybody. "Oh," was all that came out of the ofay's mouth. He walked on past Cassius, careful not to come close enough to seem threatening.

At noon, another black man took over Cassius' beat. Cassius went back to the tents outside of town to see if the U.S. Army cooks had any hot food. Sure enough, big kettles of chicken stew simmered over crackling fires. Cassius dug out his mess kit and got in line.

"How'd it go?" asked the white soldier in front of him. "Any trouble with the local yokels?"

"Nah." Cassius shook his head. But then he corrected himself: "Well, a little. This kid who don't like niggers-an' I know he don't like niggers-tried to bum food offa me."

"Hope you told him to fuck himself," the soldier said. "Little asshole can starve for all I care. Just save somebody on our side the trouble of shooting him once he grows up."

"You reckon another war's comin'?" Cassius asked as the line snaked forward.

"Shit, don't you?" the white man replied. "Sooner or later, we'll let these Confederate bastards back on their feet. A half hour after we do, they'll clean the grease off the guns they got stashed away and start greasin' us."

Was that savage cynicism or sage common sense? When it came to gauging the chances of peace and war, how much difference was there? Cassius didn't know. He did know Confederate whites despised both blacks and U.S. whites. He'd always known C.S. Negroes didn't love whites-and how little reason they had to love them. Now he'd discovered that white soldiers from the USA couldn't stand Confederate whites, either. That was reassuring.

Plainly, quite a few soldiers in green-gray didn't like Negroes, either. But they hated Confederate whites more-at least while they were down here. Confederate whites wanted them dead, and were willing-no, eager-to pick up weapons and make sure they died. Negroes in the CSA, by contrast, made natural allies. The enemy of my enemy…is at least worth dishing out rations to, Cassius thought.

The cook loaded his mess kit with as much chicken stew as anybody else got. "Here y'are, buddy," he said, his lips barely moving because of the cigarette that dangled from the corner of his mouth.

"Thanks." Cassius moved on.

When he got a cup of coffee to go with the stew, he found it heavily laced with chicory. But it came from the same big pot-almost a vat-that served the U.S. soldiers. No one was giving him particularly lousy coffee. The good stuff was hard to come by-that was all. As long as he got his fair share of what there was, he had no kick coming.

He made sure he washed his mess kit after he finished eating. The U.S. Army came down hard on you if you didn't. One dose of a jowly sergeant screaming in his face about food poisoning and the galloping shits was enough to last him a lifetime. He did notice that the sergeants screamed just as loud at white men they caught screwing up. Again, as long as they tore into everybody equally, Cassius could deal with it.

Once he'd policed up-a term that had sounded funny when he first heard it, but one he was used to now-he went over to the POW camp outside of Madison. Watching Confederate soldiers behind barbed wire was even more fun than looking at animals in cages had been when his father took him to the zoo.

The Confederates were like lions-they'd bite if they got half a chance. But he had claws of his own. The Tredegar's weight, which often annoyed him, seemed more like a safety net close to the prisoners. "I had a gun myself, I'd shoot you for totin' that thing," a POW said, shaking his fist.

"You could try," Cassius answered. "Some other ofays done tried before, but I'm still here."

"You know what happens to uppity niggers?" the POW said.

"Sure do. They git shot." Cassius started to unsling the rifle. "Same thing happens to uppity prisoners." The Confederate shut up. Cassius let his hand drop.

Some of the other POWs weren't uppity. They were just hungry. They begged from U.S. soldiers, and they begged from Negroes, too. "Got any rations you don't need?" one of them asked, stretching out his hands imploringly to Cassius.

"You feed me if I was in there?" Cassius asked.

"Well, I hope so," the man answered after a perceptible pause for thought. "I'm a Christian, or I try to be."

"Reckon Jake Featherston's a Christian, too?"

"Sure he is," the POW said, this time without hesitation. "He loves Jesus, same as you'n me. Jesus loves him, too."

"Fuck you, you ofay asshole." Cassius turned away. "You can starve."

"You ain't no Christian," the Confederate called after him.

"If Jake Featherston is, I don't want to be." Cassius walked off. He wondered if the POW would cuss him out as he went. But the man kept quiet. A few untimely demises had convinced the C.S. prisoners that they needed to watch their mouths around the surviving Negroes.

Cassius' mother would have landed on him like a thousand-pound bomb if she heard him say he didn't want to be a Christian. She prayed even when things looked worst-no, especially when they did. And she got caught in church, and went straight from church to one of Jake Featherston's murder factories. What did that say about how much being a Christian was worth? Not much, not so far as Cassius could see.

Maybe she was in heaven, the way she always thought she would be. Cassius hoped so. He had trouble believing it, though. He had trouble believing anything these days.

He found Gracchus that evening. Gracchus thought about things, too. "You reckon we'll ever fit in again?" Cassius asked.

The former guerrilla leader didn't even pretend not to understand what he was talking about. "In Georgia? Naw." Gracchus shook his head.

"Don't just mean Georgia," Cassius said. "I mean anywhere. The Confederate ofays all hate us." He didn't love whites in the CSA, either, but he left that out of the mix, continuing, "Ofays from the USA don't all hate us, I reckon, but they's so different, ain't no way we belong in Yankeeland, neither. So what does that leave?"

"Nothin'." Gracchus managed a crooked grin. "When you ever know a nigger who had more'n dat?"

"You got somethin' there," Cassius admitted. His father had had more: a kingdom of the mind, a kingdom whose size and scope Cassius was only beginning to realize he'd never fully grasped. But what did all of Xerxes' quiet wisdom win him in the end? Only another place on the train bound for hell on earth. Cassius said, "I could kill ofays for the rest o' my life an' not even start payin' them fuckers back."

"It's a bastard, ain't it?" Gracchus said. "Maybe Jake Featherston wins, an' maybe he loses. But we-uns, we-uns already done lost." Cassius started to answer, but what could he say that Gracchus hadn't?

Y es, the front was Richmond. There had always been a danger in putting the Confederate capital so close to the U.S. border. Richmond made a magnet for U.S. ambitions. McClellan had threatened it in the War of Secession; a better general likely would have taken it then. Even in the Second Mexican War, the USA dreamt of marching in. During the Great War, the flood tide of green-gray had reached Fredericksburg on its way south before the Confederate government decided it had had enough.

And now…Now Jake Featherston was red-hot, almost white-hot, with fury, but not even his unending, unyielding rage could stiffen the Confederate armies north of the capital. "God damn it to hell!" he screamed at Nathan Bedford Forrest III. "We need to bring more men into the line up there!"

"Sir, we haven't got any more men to move," Forrest replied.

"Get 'em from somewhere!" Jake said.

"Where do you recommend, sir?" the chief of the General Staff asked. "Shall we pull them out of Georgia? Or maybe out of Alabama?"

"No! Jesus Christ, no!" Featherston exclaimed. "The fucking country'll fall apart if we do." The country was falling apart anyway, but he knew it would fall apart faster if he pulled soldiers away from the sectors where they were fighting hardest. "What have we got left in the Carolinas?"

"What was there is either up here or down in Georgia," Forrest replied. "It has been for weeks." He paused, then licked his lips and asked, "Are you sure you aren't overworked, Mr. President?"

"I'm tired of nobody doin' what needs doin'-I sure am tired o' that," Jake growled.

"That's…not quite what I meant, sir." Nathan Bedford Forrest III licked his lips again. "Don't you think the strain of command has been a little too much for you? Shouldn't you take a rest, sir, and come back to duty when you're refreshed and ready to face it again?"

"Well, I don't rightly know," Featherston said slowly. "Do you really reckon I'm off?"

"The war hasn't gone the way we wish it would have, and that's a fact." Forrest sounded relieved-and surprised-that Jake wasn't hitting the armored ceiling in fourteen different places. "Maybe somebody with a fresh slant on things can stop the damnyankees, or at least get a peace we can live with out of them."

"I suppose it's possible, but I wouldn't bet on it." Under the desk, out of the general's sight, Jake's left hand hesitated between two buttons. The first one, the closer one, would send the nearest guards rushing into the office. But the chief of the General Staff plainly had a coup in mind. If he hadn't suborned those guards, he wasn't worth the paper he was printed on. "Who do you have in mind to take over afterwards? You?" Keep the son of a bitch talking. Jake's finger came down on the other button.

"I'll take military command," Nathan Bedford Forrest III replied. "But I think Vice President Partridge is the better man to talk peace with the United States. Everything stays nice and constitutional that way." He was keeping Jake talking, too, waiting till his men got here to back his play.

You stupid piece of shit. Only way to get me out of this chair is to murder me. Featherston let a little anger show, but only a little-the sort he might show if he was thinking of stepping down. "Do you reckon even the Yankees are dumb enough to take Don Partridge seriously?" he demanded. "I sure as hell don't."

"If he's speaking in the name of the President, or as the President, they'll have to listen to him." Nathan Bedford Forrest's eyes kept slipping toward the door and then jerking back to Jake. The President of the CSA wanted to look that way, too, but he didn't. He had more discipline in his pinkie than Forrest did in his whole worthless carcass.

"So who all figures the country'd be better off without me?" Jake asked. "Don must be in on this, too, right? How about Clarence Potter? He's a fellow with pretty fair judgment-always has been." He was also a fellow Featherston had suspected for years.

To his surprise, Forrest shook his head. "As a matter of fact, no. He thinks you're the best war leader we've got. I used to think so, too, but-"

He broke off. There was a commotion outside, shouts and screams and then a couple of gunshots and more screams and shouts. One of the bullets punched through what was supposed to be bulletproof glass in the door. Almost spent, it ricocheted off the wall above Jake's head and fell harmlessly to the floor.

An instant later, the door flew open with a crash. Four soldiers in camouflage uniforms burst into the President's office. Jake and Nathan Bedford Forrest III pointed at each other. "Arrest that man!" they both yelled.

Four automatic-rifle muzzles bore on the chief of the General Staff. So did the.45 Jake Featherston plucked from a desk drawer. "Hold it right there, traitor!" one of the soldiers roared.

"Freedom!" the other three shouted. They were Party Guards, not Army men. Nathan Bedford Forrest III seemed to notice that for the first time. His face turned gray as tobacco smoke. Jake Featherston watched with almost clinical interest. He'd never seen a man go that color before-not a live man, anyhow.

"How-?" Forrest gasped. That used up all the breath he had in him. He might have been a hooked crappie, drowning in air he couldn't breathe.

"What? You reckon I've only got one set of guards round this place?" Jake said. "You might be dumb enough to do something like that, but I sure ain't." He turned to the men who'd rescued him. "Make sure everything's secure down here. You find anybody you don't figure you can rely on, grab the son of a bitch. We'll sort out who's what later on. In the meantime, we squeeze answers out of this asshole. He'll sing. He'll sing like a fucking canary."

"You bet, boss." One of the Freedom Party Guards-a troop leader-grinned a sharp-toothed grin. "Once we get going, we can make a rock sing." The three-striper laughed.

So did Featherston. "He won't be a rock," he predicted. Part of him wanted to laugh at what an amateurish excuse for a coup Nathan Bedford Forrest III tried to bring off. Talking him into stepping down of his own accord! If that wasn't the dumbest thing in the world, Jake didn't know what would be. "Your granddad'd be ashamed of you," he told Forrest.

"Great-grandfather. And no, he wouldn't-he didn't like tyrants any better than I do," the suddenly former chief of the General Staff replied. He could talk a good game, but some games weren't about talk, and he'd never figured that out.

"Take him away," Jake said. He didn't want to argue with Forrest, and he didn't have to, either. But the other man hadn't the least idea what he meant. If the original Nathan Bedford Forrest planned a coup, he would have done it right. This smudgy carbon copy-hardly a Forrest at all in looks, except for the eyes-didn't know the first thing about how to manage one.

Away he went, perhaps too numb to realize yet what kind of hell he was heading for. Well, he'd find out pretty damn quick. The only thing that excused a plot was winning. Failure brought its own punishment.

Jake went out into the antechamber. Lulu sat at her desk as calmly as if two Army men didn't lie dead not ten feet away. "I knew you'd take care of that foolishness, Mr. President," she said. "Shall we call somebody to get rid of this carrion?"

"Mm-not quite yet," Featherston answered. "Let me bring in some more men I'm sure I can count on." The worst thing about having somebody mount a coup was being unable to trust the people around you afterwards.

But if he couldn't count on the Freedom Party Guards, he couldn't count on anybody-and if he couldn't count on anybody, Nathan Bedford Forrest III's strike would have worked like a charm. Jake went back to the telephone on his desk. Had Forrest had the brains to suborn the operator and keep the President from getting hold of loyal troops? That might make things dicey, even now.

But no. Within a minute, Featherston was talking with a regimental commander named Wilcy Hoyt, who promised to secure the Gray House grounds with his troops. "Freedom!" Hoyt said fervently as he rang off.

Would the men who backed Forrest fight? Would they try to take Jake out, reckoning it was their best chance? In their shoes, Featherston would have done that. He still had his.45. But the pistol was there to protect him against a visitor who turned out to be an assassin. It wouldn't help much against a squad of soldiers determined to do him in.

As soon as he got off the telephone with Hoyt, he went out and grabbed an automatic rifle from one of the dead guards. Even that wouldn't do him as much good as he wished, but it was better than the pistol. If he had to go down, he aimed to go down fighting.

"Will there be more shooting, Mr. President?" Lulu asked.

"Well, I don't know for sure, but there may be," Jake answered.

"Hand me that other rifle, then," his secretary said.

Featherston stared at her as if she'd suddenly started speaking Swahili. "You know how to use it?"

"Would I ask if I didn't?" she said.

He gave her the Tredegar. She could handle it, all right. And two rifles blasting anybody who tried to break in were bound to be better than one. "Where the devil did you learn something like this?" Jake inquired.

"A women's self-defense course," Lulu answered primly. "I thought I'd be shooting at Yankees, though, not traitors."

"Rifle works the same either way," Jake said, and she nodded. He supposed she'd feared assaults on her virtue. His own view was that any damnyankee who tried to take it would have to be desperately horny and plenty nearsighted, too. He would never have said anything like that, though. He liked Lulu, and wouldn't hurt her for the world-which he wouldn't have said about most people he knew.

But the people who showed themselves at the doorway to the outer office were Freedom Party Guards: Featherston loyalists. Jake had the first few come in without their weapons and with their hands up. They obeyed. The obvious joy they showed at seeing him alive and in charge of things left him with no doubt that they were on his side.

When they'd set up a perimeter outside the office, he began to feel more nearly certain things were going his way. "Get me another outside line," he told Lulu. She nodded. Jake snorted in soft contempt. No, Nathan Bedford Forrest hadn't known thing one about running a coup. Well, too goddamn bad for him. Jake got down to business: "Put me through to Saul Goldman."

"Yes, Mr. President," Lulu said, and she did. That the Confederate Director of Communications remained free made Jake snort again. Didn't Forrest know you couldn't run a country without propaganda? Evidently he didn't. He'd left the best liar and rumormonger in the business alone. Had Saul said no, how would Forrest have publicized his strike even if he pulled it off?

No need to flabble about that now. "Saul? This here's Jake," Featherston rasped. "Can you record me over the telephone and get me on the air? We've had us a little commotion here, but we got it licked now."

"Hold on for about a minute and a half, sir," the imperturbable Jew replied. "I need to set up the apparatus, and then you can say whatever you need to." He took a bit longer than he'd promised, but not much. "Go ahead, Mr. President."

"Thank you kindly." Jake paused to gather his thoughts. He didn't need long, either. "I'm Jake Featherston, and I'm here to tell you the truth. Truth is that a few damn fools reckoned they could do a better job of running our precious country than me. Other truth is that the traitors were wrong, and they'll pay. Oh, boy, will they ever…"

A nother new exec. Sam Carsten wondered what he'd get this time. He'd had one pearl of great price and one burr under the saddle. The powers that be might have told him to make do without. He could have done it, but it wouldn't have been any fun. He would have had to be his own ogre instead of playing the kindly, benevolent Old Man most of the time.

But a new officer had been chosen and brought down to the destroyer escort on a flying boat. And now Lieutenant Lon Menefee bobbed in the light swells of the South Atlantic as a real boat carried him from the seaplane to the Josephus Daniels.

"Permission to come aboard, sir?" he called when the boat drew up alongside the warship. By the matter-of-fact way he said it, the Josephus Daniels might have been moored in the Boston Navy Yard, not out on her own God only knew how many hundred miles from the nearest land.

"Permission granted," Sam said, just as formally. A rope ladder tied to the port rail invited Lieutenant Menefee upward. He stood up in the boat, grabbed the ladder, and climbed steadily if not with any enormous agility.

A couple of sailors stood by to grab him as he came over the rail. He turned out not to need them, which made Sam think better of him. "Reporting as ordered, sir," he said with a crisp salute.

"Good to have you aboard." Returning the salute gave Carsten the chance to look him over. He liked what he saw. Menefee was in his late twenties, with a round face, a solid build, and dark whiskers that said he might have to shave twice a day. His eyes were also dark, and showed a wry amusement that would serve him well…if Sam wasn't just imagining it, of course. Among the fruit salad on his chest was the ribbon for the Purple Heart. Pointing to it, Sam asked, "How'd you pick that up?"

"A Japanese dive bomber hit my destroyer somewhere north of Kauai," Menefee replied with a shrug. "I got a fragment in the leg. The petty officer next to me got his head blown off, so I was lucky, if you can call getting wounded lucky."

"All depends on how you look at things," Sam said. "Next to not getting hurt, getting wounded sucks. But it beats the hell out of getting killed, like you said."

"Yes, sir." Lieutenant Menefee cocked his head to one side. "I don't mean this any way bad at all, sir, but you aren't what I expected."

Carsten laughed. "If I had a nickel for every officer who served under me and said the same thing, I'd have…a hell of a lot of nickels, anyway. Who expects to run into a two-striper old enough to be his father?"

"That's not what I had in mind. Besides, I already knew you were a mustang," Menefee said. "But you're not…" He paused, visibly weighing his options. Then he plunged, like a man throwing a double-sawbuck raise into a poker game. "You're not a hardass, the way I figured you might be."

He had nerve. He had smarts, too. If that had rubbed Sam the wrong way, it could have blighted things between skipper and exec from then on out. But Menefee had it right-Sam wasn't a hardass, except every once in a while when he needed to be. "I hope not-life's mostly too short," he said now. "How come you had me gauged that way?"

"Well, I knew the executive officer you had before didn't last very long," Lon Menefee said. "If you're in my shoes, that makes you wonder."

"Mm, I can see that it would," Sam allowed. "Why don't you come to my cabin? Then we can talk about things without every sailor on the ship swinging his big, flapping hydrophones towards us."

"Hydrophones, huh?" Menefee's eyes crinkled at the corners. His mouth didn't move much, but Sam liked the smile anyway. "Lead on, sir. You know where we're going."

"I'll give you the grand tour in a bit," Sam said. "Come on."

After he closed the door to the captain's little cabin, he pulled a bottle of brandy and a couple of glasses from the steel desk by his bed. "Medicinal, of course," Lieutenant Menefee observed.

"Well, sure," Sam said, pouring. "Good for what ails you, whatever the devil it is." He handed the new exec one of the glasses. "Mud in your eye." They both drank. The brandy wasn't the best Sam had ever had-nowhere close. But it was strong, which mattered more. "So you want to hear about the old exec, do you?"

"If I'm going to sail these waters, sir, shouldn't I know where the mines are?"

"That seems fair enough," Sam said, and told him the story of Myron Zwilling. He finished, "This is just my side of it, you understand. If you listen to him, I'm sure you'd hear something different." One corner of his mouth quirked upward. "Yeah, just a little."

"I'll bet you one thing, sir," Menefee said: "He wouldn't figure the story had two sides. He'd tell me his was the only one, and he'd get mad if I tried to tell him anything different."

"I wouldn't be surprised," Sam said. Zwilling hadn't had any doubts. Sure as hell, that was part of his problem. "Do you see things in black and white, or are there shades of gray for you?"

"I hope there's gray," Menefee said. "Black and white make things easier, but only if you don't want to think."

That sounded like the right answer. But did he mean it, or was he saying what he thought his new skipper wanted to hear? I'll find out, Sam thought. Aloud, he said, "Things aboard ship are pretty much cut-and-dried right now. They'll stay that way, too, I hope, unless we need to pick another prize crew."

"I'll be all right with that," Menefee said. "I just got here, so I don't know who doesn't like me and who really can't stand me. Those are about the only choices an exec has, aren't they?"

"Pretty much," Sam said. "Is this your first time in the duty?"

"Yes, sir," the younger man replied. By the way he said it, a second term as executive officer wouldn't be far removed from a second conviction for theft. Maybe he wasn't so wrong, either. Didn't a second term as exec say you didn't deserve a command of your own?

"Just play it straight, and I expect you'll do fine," Carsten said, hoping he was right. "Pretty soon you'll have a ship of your own, and then somebody else will do your dirty work for you."

Menefee grinned. "I've heard ideas I like less-I'll tell you that. But I don't know. The war's liable to be over before they get around to giving me my own command, and after that the Navy'll shrink like nobody's business. Or do you think I'm wrong, sir?"

"It worked that way the last time around-I remember," Sam said. "This time? Well, who knows? After we get done beating the Confederates on land, we'll still need ships to teach Argentina a lesson, and England, and Japan. One of these days, the Japs'll have to learn they can't screw around with the Sandwich Islands."

"Can we go on with the little fights once the big one's over? Will anybody care, or will people be so hot for peace that they don't give a damn about anything else?"

"We'll find out, that's all," Sam said. The questions impressed him. Plainly, Lon Menefee had an eye for what was important. That was a good asset for an executive officer-or anybody else. "All we can do is what they tell us to do," Sam went on, and reached for the brandy bottle. "Want another knock?"

"No, thanks," Menefee said. "One's plenty for me. But don't let me stop you."

"I'm not gonna do it by myself." Sam put the bottle back into the desk drawer. He eyed Menefee, and wasn't astonished to find the new officer eyeing him, too. They'd both passed a test of sorts. The exec would have a friendly drink, but didn't care to take it much further than that. And Menefee had seen that, while Sam didn't live by the Navy's officially dry rules, he wasn't a closet lush, either. And neither of them had said a word about it, and neither would.

As the desk drawer closed, Menefee said, "Will you give me the tour, then, and let me meet some of the sailors who won't be able to stand me?" He spoke without rancor, and in the tones of a man who knew how things worked-and that they would work that way no matter what he thought about it. The slightly crooked grin that accompanied the words said the same thing. Sam approved, having a similar view of the world himself.

He took Menefee to the bridge first. Thad Walters had the conn, which meant a petty officer was minding the Y-ranging screens. The Josephus Daniels just didn't carry a large complement of officers. When Sam told the new exec that the chief hydrophone operator was a CPO, Menefee raised one eyebrow but then nodded, taking the news in stride.

"Lots of antiaircraft guns. I saw that when I came aboard," Menefee remarked when they went out on deck.

"That's right, and I wish we carried even more," Sam said. "The only ship-to-ship action we've fought was with a freighter that carried a light cruiser's guns. We whipped the bastard, too." Sam remembered the pride-and the terror-of that North Atlantic fight. "Most of the time, though, airplanes are our number-one worry. Way things are nowadays, warships can't get close enough to shoot at other warships. So, yeah-twin 40mm mounts all over the damn place, and the four-inchers are dual purpose, too."

"Sure. They've got more reach than the smaller guns." Lieutenant Menefee nodded. "Things look about the same to me. If we don't find some kind of way to keep bombers off our backs, the whole surface Navy's liable to be in trouble."

"During the Great War, everybody flabbled about submersibles. This time around, it's airplanes. But as long as we bring our own airplanes with us, we can fight anywhere. And the carriers need ships to help keep the bad guys' airplanes away from them, so I figure we can keep working awhile longer, anyhow."

"Sounds good to me, sir." Menefee gave him another of those wry grins.

When they got to the engine room, the new exec started gabbing with the black gang in a way that showed he knew exactly what he was talking about. "So you come from engineering?" Sam said.

"Shows a little, does it?" Menefee said. "Yes, that's what I know. How about you, sir?"

"Gunnery and damage control," Sam answered. "We've got the ship covered between us-except for all the fancy new electronics, I mean."

"Most of the guys who understand that stuff don't understand anything else-looks that way to me, anyhow," Menefee said.

"Me, too," Carsten agreed. "If you can figure out all the fancy circuits, doesn't seem likely you'll know how people work. I wouldn't want one of those slide-rule pushers in charge of a ship." But then he stopped himself, holding up his right hand. "Thad's an exception, I think. He can make the Y-ranging gear sit up and roll over and beg, but he's a damn good officer, too. You'll see."

"He's mighty young. He's had the chance to get used to it right from the start," Menefee said. Sam nodded, carefully holding in his smile. To his eyes, Lon Menefee was mighty damn young, too. But the new exec was right-there were degrees to everything. Young, younger, youngest. Sam couldn't hide the smile any more. Where the hell did old fart fit into that scheme?

N ot Richmond, not any more. Richmond was a battleground. Basically, everything north of the James was a battleground-except for what had already fallen. And the damnyankees had a couple of bridgeheads over the river, too. They hadn't tried to break out of them, not yet, but the Confederates couldn't smash them, either. And so, when Clarence Potter left Lexington to report to Jake Featherston on what the physicists at Washington University were up to, he headed for Petersburg instead of the doomed capital of the CSA.

Getting to Petersburg was an adventure. Getting anywhere in the Confederacy was an adventure these days. But the Confederate States had hung on to equality in the air in northern Virginia, Maryland, and southern Pennsylvania longer than they had anywhere else. They'd hung on, and hung on, and hung on…till they couldn't hang on any more. That was how things stood now.

Antiaircraft guns still blazed away at strafing U.S. fighters and fighter-bombers. But antiaircraft guns were just annoyances. What really held enemy aircraft at bay were your own airplanes. And the Confederates didn't have enough to do the job any more.

His motorcar went off the road several times. It raced for a bridge once, and hid under the concrete shelter with bullets chewing up the ground to either side till the aerial wolves decided they couldn't get him and went off after other, easier game. Then, cautiously, the driver put the butternut Birmingham in gear.

"Some fun, huh?" Potter said.

The look the PFC at the wheel gave him told him how flat the joke fell. "Hope to Jesus whatever the hell you're doin' on the road is win-the-war important," the kid said. "If it ain't, we got no business travelin', on account of the damnyankees're too fuckin' likely to shoot our dicks off. Sir."

Potter wanted to clutch himself like a maiden surprised. The mere thought was appalling. Reality was worse. He'd seen it. He wanted no closer acquaintance with it than that. But he said, "It just may be, soldier. If anything can nowadays, it's got a pretty fair chance."

"Hope so," the driver said. This time, his suspicious stare was all too familiar. "How come you talk like a Yankee yourself?"

"'Cause I went to college up there a million years ago, and I wanted to fit in," Potter replied. "And if I had a dime for every time I've answered that question, I'd be too rich to worry about an Army post."

"Reckon we'll go through security before we get real far into Petersburg." The driver sounded as if he was looking forward to it, which meant he didn't completely believe Potter. And if I had a dime for that, too… the Intelligence officer thought.

He figured Petersburg would be something out of Dante, and he was right. Soldiers and bureaucrats and civilian refugees thrombosed the streets. People moved forward by shouting and waving fists and sometimes by shooting guns in the air. Potter saw bodies hanging from lampposts. Some said DESERTER. Others said SPY. He felt the driver's eye on him, but pretended he didn't.

Sure as hell, there were security checkpoints almost every block. "Papers!" the soldiers or Freedom Party Guards-more and more Guards as Potter neared the center of town-would shout. The wreathed stars on his collar meant nothing to them. Considering that Nathan Bedford Forrest III and other high-ranking officers had risen against Jake Featherston, that made more sense than Potter wished it did.

Then a Freedom Party Guard checked off his name on a clipboard. "You're on our list," said the man in a camouflage smock. "You come with me right now." By the way he jerked the muzzle of his automatic rifle, Potter would be sorry if he didn't-although perhaps not for long.

"Where are you taking me?" Potter asked.

"Never mind that. Get out of your auto and come along," the Party Guard said.

Not seeing any other choice but starting a firefight he couldn't hope to win, Potter got out of the Birmingham. "Good luck, sir," the driver said.

"Thanks." Potter hoped he wouldn't need it, but it never hurt.

None of his escort-captors? — demanded the pistol on his belt. He wondered whether that was a good omen or simply an oversight. One way or the other, he figured he'd find out before long. "Now that we've got him, what the hell do we do with him?" another Party Guard asked.

The one who'd decided Potter was a wanted man checked the clipboard again. "We take him to the Lawn, that's what," he answered.

It meant something to the other Freedom Party Guard, if not to Clarence Potter. The security troops hustled him along. Nobody laid a finger on him, but nobody let him slow down, either: not quite a frog-march, but definitely something close.

The Lawn, on Sycamore near the corner of Liberty, turned out to be a tall red-brick house much overgrown by ivy. The grass in front of it had gone yellow-brown from winter cold. More Freedom Party Guards manned a barbed-wire perimeter outside the house. They relieved Potter of the.45 before letting him go forward. Before he could go inside, a stonefaced Army captain gave him the most thorough-and most intimate-patting down he'd ever had the displeasure to get.

"Do you want me to turn my head and cough?" he asked as the captain's probing fingers found another sensitive spot.

"That won't be necessary." The young officer didn't change expression at all.

"Necessary…sir?" Potter suggested. He didn't usually stand on military ceremony, but he was sick and tired of being treated like a dangerous piece of meat.

He watched the captain think it over. The process took much longer than he thought it should have. At last, grudgingly, the man nodded. "You are on the list, and it looks like you're clean. So…it won't be necessary, sir. Are you happy…sir?"

"Dancing in the goddamn daisies," Potter replied.

That got the ghost of a grin from the young captain. "Go on in, then, sir." No audible pause this time. "The boss will take care of you."

"Who-?" Clarence Potter began, but the captain had already forgotten about him. Somebody else was coming up to the Lawn, and needed frisking. Those educated hands had more work to do. Muttering, Potter went on in. When he saw Lulu typing on a card table set up in the foyer, he figured out what was going on.

She paused when she recognized him. He almost laughed at the sniff she let out. She never had liked him-she never thought he was loyal enough to the President. But it wasn't funny any more. The way things were these days, suspicion of disloyalty was liable to be a capital offense.

"General Potter," the President's secretary said.

"Hello, Lulu," Potter answered gravely. "Is he all right?"

"He's just fine." She got to her feet. "You stay right there"-as if he were likely to go anywhere. "I'll tell him you're here." The Confederate States of America might be going down the drain, but you couldn't tell from the way Lulu acted. She came back a moment later. "He wants to see you. This way, please."

This way took him through the living room, down a hall, past four more guards-any one of whom looked able to tear him in half without breaking a sweat-and into a bedroom. Jake Featherston was shouting into a telephone: "Don't just sit there with your thumb up your ass, goddammit! Hurry!" He slammed the handset down.

Lulu's cough said she disapproved of the bad language even more than of the man she escorted. "General Potter is here to see you, sir," she said. She still didn't care for Potter, though, not even a little bit.

"Thank you, darling," Jake said. Watching him sweet-talk his secretary never failed to bemuse Potter. He wouldn't have bet Featherston could do it if he hadn't seen it with his own eyes again and again. "Come in, Potter. Sit down." He pointed to a chair. "Lulu, hon, please close the door on your way out." Please! Who would have thought it was in the President's vocabulary?

Lulu gave Potter a fishy stare, but she did as Jake Featherston asked. "Reporting as ordered, Mr. President," Potter said, sinking into the overstuffed chair. It was all red velvet and brass nails, and looked like something from a Victorian brothel.

"How close are they to a uranium bomb?" Featherston didn't waste time or politeness on Potter. The President looked like hell: pale and haggard and skinny, with big dark circles under his eyes. How much did he sleep? Did he sleep at all? Potter wouldn't have bet on it.

"They're getting closer, sir," he answered. "They're talking about months now, not years-if the damnyankees' bombs don't set them back again."

"Months! Jesus Christ! We can't wait months!" Jake howled. "Haven't they noticed? This goddamn country's falling apart around their ears! Atlanta! Richmond! Savannah's going, and God only knows how long Birmingham will last. We need that fucker, and we need it yesterday. Not tomorrow, not today-yesterday! Months!" He rolled his eyes up to the heavens.

"Sir, I'm just telling you what Professor FitzBelmont told me," Potter said. "He also said that if you think you can find someone who'll do it better and faster, you should put him in charge."

Featherston swore. "There isn't anybody like that, is there?"

"If there is, Mr. President, I sure don't know about him," Potter answered. "Shall we try disrupting the U.S. program again?"

"What the fuck difference does it make?" Featherston said bitterly. That alarmed Potter, who'd never before heard him back away from anything. Even more bitterly, the President went on, "Shit, they're licking us without uranium bombs. I never would've reckoned they could, but they damn well are. Makes you wonder if we deserve to live, doesn't it?"

"No, sir. I have to believe that," Potter said. "This is my country. I'll do everything I can for it."

Featherston cocked his head to one side. "Ask you something?"

"You're the President, sir. How can I say no?"

"You sure never had any trouble before. But how come you didn't throw in with Bedford Forrest III and the rest of those bastards?"

"Sir, we're in a war. We need you. We need you bad. Whoever they brought in instead would have been worse. Chances are the Yankees wouldn't have made peace with him, either, not this side of-what do they call it? — unconditional surrender. That kills us. Way it looks to me is, we've got to keep fighting, because all our other choices are worse. Maybe the slide-rule brigade can save us. It's the best hope we've got, anyhow."

He realized he'd just admitted he knew about Forrest's plot, even if he hadn't gone along with it. If Jake wanted his head, he could have it. But that had always been true, ever since the Richmond Olympics. "Well, I get straight answers from you, anyway," the Confederate President said. "Listen, you go back and tell FitzBelmont I don't care what he does or who he kills-we've got to have that bomb, and faster than months. Get his head out of the clouds. Make sure he understands. It's his country, too, what's left of it."

"I'll do my best, sir. I don't know how much I can hurry the physicists, though," Potter said.

"You'd better, that's all I've got to tell you," Featherston said. Clarence Potter nodded. He'd seen the President of the CSA angry before-Jake Featherston ran on anger the way trucks ran on gasoline. He'd seen him gleeful. He'd seen him stubborn and defiant. But never-never till now, anyway-had he seen him desperate.

N ext stop, Birmingham!" Michael Pound said exultantly. It wasn't spring yet, not even here in Alabama, where spring came early. It wasn't spring, no, but something even sweeter than birdsong and flowers filled the air. When Pound sniffed, he didn't just smell exhaust fumes and cordite and unbathed soldiers. He smelled victory.

The Confederates hadn't quit. He didn't think they knew the meaning of the word. Some of their terrifying new barrels came into the front line without so much as a coat of paint-straight from the factories U.S. bombers and now artillery were still trying to knock out. The crews who fought those shiny metal monsters were brave, no doubt about it. But all the courage in the world couldn't make up for missing skill.

And, while the Confederate machines trickled from their battered factories in dribs and drabs, U.S. production went up and up. Maybe a new C.S. barrel was worth two of the best U.S. model. If the USA had four or five times as many barrels where it mattered, how much did that individual superiority matter?

Not enough.

Pound guided his barrel past the guttering corpse of a machine that had tried conclusions with several U.S. barrels at once. That might have been a brave mistake, but a mistake it undoubtedly was. The Confederates had made so many big mistakes, they couldn't afford even small ones any more.

Somebody not far away fired an automatic rifle. Maybe that was a U.S. soldier with a captured weapon. On the other hand, maybe it was a Freedom Party Guard aiming at a barrel commander riding along with head and shoulders out of the cupola. Regretfully, Michael Pound decided not to take the chance. He ducked down into the machine.

"Where the hell are we, sir?" Sergeant Scullard asked. The gunner didn't get nearly so many chances to look around as the barrel commander did.

Despite having those chances, Pound needed to check a map before he answered, "Far as I can tell, we're just outside of Columbiana."

"And where the fuck's Columbiana?"

Unless you were born and raised in central Alabama, that was another reasonable question. "Twenty, maybe thirty miles from Birmingham, south and a little bit east," Pound said. "Town's got a munitions plant in it, run by the C. B. Churchill Company-that's what the map notes say, anyhow."

"Fuck," the gunner repeated, this time as a term of general disapproval. "That means those butternut assholes'll fight like mad bastards to keep us out."

"They've been fighting like mad bastards for almost three years," Pound said. "How much good has it done 'em? We're in the middle of Alabama. We've got 'em cut in half, or near enough so it makes no difference. If they had any brains, they'd quit now, because they can't win."

"Yeah, and then they'd spend the next hundred years bushwhacking us." Scullard was not in a cheerful mood.

Pound grunted. The gunner might have meant that for a sour joke. Even if he did, it made an unfortunate amount of sense. In a standup fight, the Confederacy was losing. But how much fun would it be to occupy a country where everybody hated your guts and wanted you dead? After the Great War, the United States hadn't enjoyed trying to hold on to Kentucky and Houston and Sequoyah. If the USA tried to hang on to the whole CSA…

"Well, nobody ever said the Army would go out of style any time soon," Pound said.

"A good thing, too," Scullard replied. "If we're in deep shit now, we'd be in a lot deeper without this baby." He rapped his knuckles on the breech of the barrel's main armament, adding, "I just wish we had more like it."

"They're coming," Pound said. "Maybe not as fast as if we'd started sooner, but they are. We can make more stuff than the Confederates can. Sooner or later, we'll knock 'em flat, and it's getting on toward sooner."

The words were hardly out of his mouth before a Confederate antibarrel rocket slammed into a U.S. machine a quarter of a mile away. The green-gray barrel brewed up, sending an enormous and monstrously perfect smoke ring up and out through the open cupola. Fire and greasy black smoke followed an instant later as the barrel slewed to a stop. Pound didn't think anybody got out.

He swore under his breath. The United States were making more stuff than the Confederate States could, yes. Sometimes, though-too damn often, in fact-the Confederates made better stuff. The automatic rifles their infantry carried, these antibarrel rockets, the screaming meemies that could flatten acres at a volley, the long-range jobs that reached into the USA…The enemy had talented engineers. Their cause stank like a dead fish, but they were good at what they did.

Scullard must have seen the U.S. barrel go up, too. "I hope we knock 'em flat sooner," he said. "That way, the mothers don't have the chance to come up with anything really nasty."

"Yeah," Michael Pound said. That marched with his own thoughts much too well.

Fields and forest surrounded Columbiana. Two routes led up to the town from the south: a county road whose thin blacktop coat the barrels' tracks quickly wrecked, and a railroad line maybe a hundred yards to the west. They were both nice and straight, and Pound couldn't have said which he distrusted more. They both let the Confederates see what was coming long before it got there.

And what they could see, they were too likely to be able to hit. That blazing barrel said as much. Of course, banging your way through the woods was asking to get nailed by some kid in butternut crouching behind a pine tree. You'd never spot him till he fired off his stovepipe, and that was too damn late.

Pound stood up in the cupola. He wanted to find out just how much U.S. armor was close enough to follow his platoon's lead. He hoped the other barrels would follow, anyway. If they didn't, he was liable to end up slightly dead.

Or more than slightly.

Sometimes, though, a barrel's engine was as important a weapon as its cannon. This felt like one of those times. Accidentally on purpose, he sent his orders over the all-company circuit instead of the one that linked him to his platoon alone: "Men, we are going to charge up this miserable little road as fast as we can go. We are going to blast anything that gets in our way, and we'll be inside Columbiana before Featherston's fuckers figure out what hit 'em." I hope. "Follow me. If this goes wrong, they'll get my barrel first." He switched to the intercom so he could talk to his driver: "You hear that, Beans?"

"Yes, sir." The driver's name was Neyer, but he rarely had to answer to it. His fondness for one particular ration can had given him a handle he'd keep till he took off his uniform…or till he got blown to smithereens, which might happen in the next couple of minutes.

Don't think about it, Pound told himself. If you think about it, you'll get cold feet. "Then gun it," he said. He was sure his own platoon would come with him. The rest…Don't think about that, either.

The engine roared. The barrel zipped forward. Flat out, it could do better than thirty. On rough ground, going like that would have torn out the kidneys of the men inside. On the road, it was tolerable…barely.

"Shoot first if you see anything," Pound advised, shouting over the noise.

"Going this fast, the stabilizer ain't worth shit," the gunner answered.

"Shoot first anyway. Even if you miss, you make the other guy duck. Then you can make your second shot count."

Scullard grunted. Pound knew damn well he was right, but he could see that it wasn't the sort of thing where you'd want to bet your life if you didn't have to.

As they neared Columbiana, they found there were Confederate soldiers on the road. The men in butternut hadn't figured the Yankees would be dumb enough or crazy enough to thunder down on them like that. The bow machine gun and the coaxial machine gun in the turret both started jackhammering. The C.S. troops scattered.

"Give 'em a couple of rounds of HE, too," Pound said. "Something to remember us by, you know?"

"Yes, sir!" Scullard said enthusiastically, and then, to the loader, "HE!"

The main armament thundered twice. A 3Ѕ-inch shell carried enough cordite to make a pretty good boom when it burst. One round went off in the middle of a knot of fleeing Confederates. Men and pieces of men described arcs through the air.

"Nice shot!" Pound yelled. Only later did he remember he was cheering death and mayhem. They were what he did for a living, his stock in trade. Most of the time, he took them for granted. He wondered why he couldn't quite do it now.

Then he did, because the barrel roared into Columbiana. He had no time to think about killing-he was too busy doing it. The barrel crew might have been an extension of his arm, an extension of his will.

"Where the hell is Lester Street?" he muttered. That was where the C. B. Churchill Company was, and had been since 1862. A glance through the periscopes built into the cupola told him what he needed to know. The biggest building in town, the one with the Stars and Bars flying over it, had to be the munitions factory. "Send a couple of HE rounds in there, too," he told the gunner. "Let 'em know they've just gone out of business."

"Right." But before Scullard could fire, machine-gun bullets rattled off the barrel's sides and turret, clattering but doing no harm. The bow gunner sent a long burst into a general store with a big DRINK DR. HOPPER! sign out front. Pound had tried the fizzy water, and thought it tasted like horse piss and sugar. The enemy machine gun abruptly cut off.

Boom! Boom! Pound watched holes appear in the munitions plant's southern wall. He giggled like a kid. Sometimes destruction for its own sake was more fun than anything else an alleged adult could do. He wondered whether Jake Featherston had an advanced case of the same disease.

And then he got more in the way of destruction than even he wanted. Maybe one of those HE rounds blew up something inside the factory. Maybe somebody in there decided he'd be damned if he let the plant fall into U.S. hands. Any which way, it went sky high.

Pound and his barrel were more than half a mile away. Even through inches of steel armor, the roar was overwhelming. The barrel weighed upwards of forty tons. All the same, the front end came off the ground. The machine might have been a rearing horse, except Pound was afraid it would flip right over onto its turret. Scullard's startled "Fuck!" said he wasn't the only one, either.

But the barrel thudded back down onto its tracks. Pound peered out through the periscopes again. One of the forward ones was cracked, which said just how big a blast that was. It must have knocked half of Columbiana flat.

"Well," he said, "we liberated the living shit out of this place."

F lora Blackford was listening to debate on a national parks appropriation bill-not everything Congress did touched on the war, though it often seemed that way-when a House page hurried up to her. His fresh features and beardless cheeks said he was about fifteen: too young to conscript, though the Confederates were giving guns to kids that age, using up their next generation.

"For you, Congresswoman," the page whispered. He handed her an envelope and took off before she could even thank him.

She opened the envelope and unfolded the note inside. Come see me the second you get this-Franklin, it said. She recognized the Assistant Secretary of War's bold handwriting.

Any excuse to get away from this dreary debate was a good one. She hurried out of Congressional Hall-leaving was much easier than getting in-and flagged a cab. The War Department was within walking distance, but a taxi was faster. When Franklin Roosevelt wrote, Come see me the second you get this, she assumed he meant it.

"Heck of a thing about this Russian town, isn't it?" the driver said.

"I'm sorry. I haven't heard any news since early this morning," Flora said.

"Bet you will." The cabby pulled up in front of the massive-and badly damaged-War Department building. "Thirty-five cents, ma'am."

"Here." Flora gave him half a dollar and didn't wait for change. A newsboy waved papers and shouted about Petrograd, so something had happened in Russia. Maybe the Tsar was dead. That might help the USA's German allies.

She hurried up the scarred steps. At the top, her Congressional ID convinced the guards that she was who she said she was. One of them telephoned Roosevelt's office, deep in the bowels of the building. When he'd satisfied himself that she was expected, he said, "Jonesy here'll take you where you need to go, ma'am. Somebody will check you out as soon as you get inside."

Check you out was a euphemism for pat you down. The tight-faced woman who did it took no obvious pleasure from it, which was something, anyhow. After she finished and nodded, Jonesy-who looked even younger than Flora's own Joshua-said, "Come along with me, ma'am."

Down they went, stairway after stairway. Her calves didn't look forward to climbing those stairs on the way up. Franklin Roosevelt had a special elevator because of his wheelchair, but no mere Congresswoman-not even a former First Lady-got to ride it.

"Here we go." Jonesy stopped in front of Roosevelt's office. "I'll take you up when you're done." Don't go wandering around on your own. Nobody ever came out and said that, but it always hung in the air.

The captain in the Assistant Secretary of War's outer office nodded to Flora. "Hello, Congresswoman. You made good time. Go right in-Mr. Roosevelt is expecting you."

"Thanks," Flora said. "Can you tell me what this is about?"

"I think he'd better do that, ma'am."

Shrugging, Flora walked into Franklin Roosevelt's private office. "Hello, Flora. Close the door behind you, would you, please? Thanks." As always, Roosevelt sounded strong and jovial. But he looked like death warmed over.

He waved her to a chair. As she sat, she asked, "Now will you tell me what's going on? It must be something big."

"Petrograd's gone," Roosevelt said bluntly.

"A newsboy outside was saying something about that," Flora said. "Why does it matter so much to us? To the Kaiser, sure, but to us? And what do you mean, gone?"

"When I say gone, I usually mean gone," Franklin Roosevelt answered. "One bomb. Off the map. G-O-N-E. Gone. No more Petrograd. Gone."

"But that's imposs-" Flora broke off. She was as far from Catholic as she could be, but she felt the impulse to cross herself even so. She was glad she was sitting down. "Oh, my God," she whispered, and wanted to start the mourner's Kaddish right after that. "The Germans…Uranium…" She stopped. She wasn't making any sense, even to herself.

But she made enough sense for Roosevelt. He nodded, his face thoroughly grim. "That's right. They got there first. They tried it-and it works. God help us all."

"Do they have more of them?" Questions started to boil in Flora's head. "What are they saying? And what about the Russians? Have England and France said anything yet?"

"We got a ciphered message yesterday that made me think they were going to try it," the Assistant Secretary of War said. "They were cagey. I would be, too. Wouldn't be good to say too much if the other side is reading your mail, so to speak. And the Kaiser just talked on Wireless Berlin." He looked down at a piece of paper on his desk. "'We have harnessed a fundamental force of nature,' he said. 'The power that sets the stars alight now also shines on earth. A last warning to our foes-give up this war or face destruction you cannot hope to escape.'"

"My God," Flora said, and then again, "My God!" Once you'd said that, what was left? Nothing she could see-not for a moment, anyhow. Then she did find something: "How close are we?"

"We're getting there," Roosevelt said, which might mean anything or nothing. The exasperated noise Flora made said it wasn't good enough, whatever it meant. Roosevelt spread his hands, as if to placate her. "The people out in Washington say we're getting close," he went on. "I don't know if that means days, weeks, or months. They swear on a stack of Bibles that it doesn't mean years."

"It had better not, not after all the time they've already used and all the money we've given them," Flora said. If not for the money, she never would have known anything about the U.S. project. And she found another question, one she wished she didn't need to ask: "How close is Jake Featherston?" Even with the Stars and Stripes flying in Richmond for the first time since 1861, she thought of the Confederacy boiled down to the terrifying personality of its leader.

So did Franklin Roosevelt, as his answer showed: "We still think he's behind us. We're plastering his uranium works every chance we get, and we get more chances all the time, because we're finally beating down the air defenses over Lexington. His people have put a lot of stuff underground, but doing that must have cost them time. If we're not ahead, he's got miracle workers, and I don't think he does."

"Alevai," Flora said, and then, "Do they have any idea how many dead there are in Petrograd?" Part of her wished she hadn't thought of that. Most of the dead wouldn't be soldiers or sailors. Some would be factory workers, and she supposed you could argue that the people who made the guns mattered as much in modern war as the people who fired them. All the generals did argue exactly that, in fact. But so many would be street sweepers and dentists and waitresses and schoolchildren…Thousands? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? From one bomb? "My God!" she exclaimed again.

Franklin Roosevelt shrugged the broad shoulders that went so strangely with his withered, useless legs. "Flora, I just don't know. I don't think anyone knows yet-not the Germans, not the Russians, nobody. Right now…Right now, the whole world just took a left to the chops. It's standing there stunned, trying not to fall over."

That wasn't the comparison Flora would have used, but it was vivid enough to make her nod. Before she could say anything-if she could find anything to say beyond one more "My God!" — the captain from the outer office came in and nodded to Roosevelt. "Sir, the Tsar just issued a statement."

"What did he say?" Roosevelt and Flora asked at the same time.

The captain glanced down at a piece of paper in his left hand. "He calls this a vicious, unholy, murderous weapon, and he condemns the massacre of innocents it caused." That went well with Flora's thoughts.

"Did he say anything about surrender?" Franklin Roosevelt asked.

"No, sir." The young officer shook his head. "But he did say God would punish the Kaiser and 'the accursed scientists and people of Germany'-his words-even if the Russian Army couldn't do the job."

"How can he keep fighting if Germany can drop bombs like that and he can't?" Flora asked, not really aiming the question at either Roosevelt or the captain. Was God listening? If He was, would He have let that bomb go off? "Moscow, Minsk, Tsaritsyn…" She ran out of Russian cities. She did, yes, but she was sure the Germans wouldn't.

"Russia always takes more losses than her enemies," the Assistant Secretary of War said. "That's the only way she stays in wars. But losses on that kind of scale? I don't think so, not for long."

"If the Tsar tries to go on fighting and the Germans drop one of those on Moscow, say, don't you think all the Reds who've gone underground will rise up again?" the captain asked. "Wouldn't you?"

"How many Reds are left?" Flora asked. "Didn't the Tsar's secret police kill off as many as they could after the last civil war?"

"They sure did," Franklin Roosevelt said, and the captain nodded. Roosevelt went on, "We know the secret police didn't get everybody, though. And the Reds are masters at going underground and staying there."

"They have to be, if they want to keep breathing," the captain added.

"So the short answer is, nobody-nobody on this side of the Atlantic, that's for sure-knows how many Reds there are," Roosevelt said. "Something like a uranium bomb will bring them out, though, if anything will."

"And if it doesn't kill them," the captain said. "Chances are, there are a lot of them close to Petrograd and Moscow."

Flora nodded. Those were the two most important Russian cities, and the Reds were like anybody else-they'd want to stay as close to the center of things as they could. Her thoughts went west. "England and France have to be shaking in their boots right now," she said. "Unless they've got bombs of their own, I mean."

"If they had them, they would use them," Roosevelt said. "The war in the west has turned against them-not as much as the war here has turned against the CSA, but enough. If the Kaiser's barrels really get rolling across Holland and Belgium and northern France, it won't be easy to stop them this side of Paris."

"Paris," Flora echoed. The Germans hadn't got there in 1917; the French asked for an armistice before they could. Kaiser Wilhelm granted it, too. Looking back, that was probably a mistake. Like the Confederates, the French weren't really convinced they'd been beaten. "This time, the Germans ought to parade through the streets, the way they did in 1871."

"Sounds good to me," Roosevelt said. "Keep it under your hat, but I've heard Charlie La Follette's going to go to Richmond."

"Is it safe?" Flora asked.

"Not even a little bit, but he's going to do it anyhow," Roosevelt answered. "Abe Lincoln couldn't, God knows James G. Blaine couldn't, even my Democratic cousin Theodore couldn't, but La Follette can. And there's an election this November."

"Good point," Flora agreed. How many votes would each photo of President La Follette in the ravaged and captured capital of the Confederacy be worth? Maybe as many as the uranium bomb had killed, and that was bound to be a lot.