In At the Death

VIII

I n! In! In!" Sergeant Hugo Blackledge bellowed. "Move your sorry asses before you get 'em shot off!"

Corporal Jorge Rodriguez hurried aboard the little coastal freighter. Fires in Savannah lit up the docks almost bright as day. Every so often, a flash and a boom would mark another ammo dump or cache of shells going up in smoke. The port was falling. Anybody who stayed to try to hold up the damnyankees would end up dead or a POW. Orders were to get out as many soldiers as could escape.

Nervously, Rodriguez looked up into the sky. If any fighters came over right now, they could chew his company to pieces. But they mostly stayed on the runways after dark. With a little luck, this ship-the Dixie Princess, her name was-would be far away from Savannah by the time the sun came up.

"Ever been on a boat before?" Gabe Medwick asked.

"No," Jorge admitted. "You?"

"A little rowboat, fishin' for bluegill an' catfish," his friend said. "This ain't the same thing, is it? Not hardly." He answered his own question.

Soldiers from eight or ten regiments-not all of them even from the same division-jammed the Dixie Princess. They eyed one another like dogs uncertain whether to fight. Sailors in gray dungarees elbowed their way through the butternut crush. They knew where they were going and what they were doing, which gave them a big edge on the troops they were carrying.

The rumble of the engines got deeper. Rodriguez felt the deck vibrate under his boots. The freighter pulled away from the pier and down the Savannah River toward the sea.

Only gradually did Jorge realize there were antiaircraft guns on deck. More sailors manned them. Some wore helmets painted gray. Others stayed bareheaded, as if to say a helmet wouldn't make any difference in what they did. A soldier near Jorge lit a cigarette.

"Kill that, you dumb dipshit!" Sergeant Blackledge yelled. "Kill it, you hear me? You want some damnyankee to spot your match or your coal? Jesus God, how fuckin' stupid are you, anyways?"

"All right, all right," the offender muttered. Down to the deck went the smoke. A boot mournfully crushed it out.

"Now, when it gets light y'all got to keep your eyes peeled for damnyankee submarines," Blackledge went on. "One of them fuckers puts a torpedo in our guts, it's a hell of a long swim to land, you know what I mean?"

"Boy," Gabriel Medwick muttered, "he sure knows how to make a guy feel safe."

Jorge laughed. That was so far wrong, it was funny. It would have been funny, anyway, if he weren't aboard this floating coffin. How many men were with him? He wasn't sure, but it had to be a couple of thousand. A damnyankee submersible skipper who sank the Dixie Princess would probably get the biggest, fanciest medal the USA could give out.

"You reckon it's true, what happened to that town in Russia?" somebody not far away from him asked.

"It's bullshit, you ask me," another soldier answered. "Damn Kaiser's just runnin' his mouth. Stands to reason-a city's too fuckin' big for one bomb to take out."

"You hear about that?" Medwick asked Jorge.

He nodded. "I hear, sн, but I don't know what to believe. What do you think?"

"I hope like anything it's bullshit," his buddy said. "If it ain't…If it ain't, we all got more trouble than we know what to do with. If the Germans have a bomb like that, if it's really real, how long before the Yankees do, too?"

"ЎMadre de Dios!" Jorge crossed himself. "One bomb, one city? You couldn't fight back against something like that, not unless…Maybe we get those bombs, too."

"Maybe." Gabe seemed doubtful. "If we get 'em, we better get 'em pretty damn quick, that's all I got to say. Otherwise, it's gonna be too late."

He wasn't wrong, however much Jorge wished he were. The fall of Savannah meant the Confederate States were cut in half. People were saying that Richmond had fallen, too, and that Jake Featherston had got out one jump ahead of the U.S. soldiers coming in. Some people said he hadn't got out, but that didn't seem to be true, because he was still on the wireless.

What can I do about any of that? Jorge wondered. The only answer that occurred to him was, Not much. He yawned; it had to be somewhere not long after midnight. He couldn't even lie down and go to sleep: no room to lie down. He dozed a little standing up, the way only a tired veteran could.

Dawn was just painting the eastern horizon-all ocean, flat out to the edge of the world-with pink when he saw another ship ahead. No, it was a boat, much smaller than the Dixie Princess. It had a blinker that flashed Morse at the freighter. Up on the bridge, where no soldiers were allowed, a sailor-maybe an officer-answered back.

"What's going on?" Gabe Medwick asked around a yawn.

"Beats me," Jorge answered. "We just gotta wait and find out." If that didn't sum up a lot of soldiering, what did?

The Dixie Princess changed course and followed the smaller craft toward the low-lying coast ahead. Her guide zigged and zagged in a way that made no sense to Jorge. And whatever the guide did, the Dixie Princess did, too.

Then somebody said, "We better not hit one of them damn mines, that's all I got to say. That'd be worse'n getting torpedoed."

A light went on in Jorge's head. They had to be heading towards a port, one warded by mines to keep out U.S. warships. And the small boat knew the way through the floating death traps. Jorge hoped like hell it did, anyhow.

WELCOME TO BEAUFORT, a sign said. Jorge would have guessed the name was pronounced Bofort. What his guess was worth, he found out when a man with bushy white side whiskers called, "Welcome to Bew-fort, y'all! Where d'you go from here?"

Jorge hadn't the faintest idea. Somebody-probably an officer-called, "Where's your train station?"

"Mile outside o' town," the old-timer said, pointing west. "We like our peace and quiet, we do. Ain't but one train a day anyways."

"Jesus H. Christ!" the officer exploded. "This is as bad as it would've been before the War of Secession!"

"No, sir." The white-whiskered man shook his head. "We had the hurricane back in '40, and the really bad one back in '93, an' we came through both o' them. And besides, we was full o' niggers in the old days. Ain't hardly got no more coons around now, though. Don't hardly miss 'em, neither. More room for the rest of us, by God."

Odds were the Negroes had done most of the hard work. Sailors had to jump down from the Dixie Princess and grab the mooring lines that bound her to the pier. Gangplanks thudded onto the rickety planking.

"Disembark! Form up in column of fours!" an officer shouted. "We will proceed to the railroad station and board transportation for Virginia!"

"Well, now we know what we're doing, anyway," Gabe Medwick said.

"Sн." Jorge nodded. "But one train a day? How big a train is it gonna be? How long we gonna have to wait?" He looked up at the sky, which was sunny and blue. "We ain't that far from Savannah, even now. What if a damnyankee airplane sees us? They come and drop bombs on our heads, that's what."

"Better not happen, that's all I've got to say." Medwick shivered at the idea, though the day felt more like spring than winter.

Down the gangplanks went the soldiers. As corporals, Jorge and Gabe tried to gather their squads together, but they didn't have much luck. The soldiers had got too mixed up in the desperate boarding in Savannah. "Hell with it," Sergeant Blackledge said-he was trying to gather a whole section, and having no more success than the squad leaders. "We'll sort things out when we get wherever the hell we're going."

They marched through Beaufort. Though it wasn't at all far from Savannah, the war might have forgotten all about it. Only some small, shabby houses with broken windows and with doors standing open spoke of the blacks who'd lived here till not long before.

Old men and those too badly maimed to fight-and a few women, too-crewed fishing and oystering boats. Truck gardens grew all around the town. Women and kids and the old and injured tended them, too.

At the station, the railroad agent stared at the long butternut column in unabashed horror. "What in God's name am I supposed to do with y'all?" he said.

"Get on the telegraph. Get trains down here, dammit," an officer answered. "We got out of Savannah. They want us up in Virginia. Fuck me if we're gonna walk."

"Well, I'll try," the agent said doubtfully.

"You better." The officer-he was, Jorge saw, a colonel, with three stars on each side of his collar-didn't even bother disguising the threat.

The agent clicked away on the telegraph. A few minutes later, an answer came back. "They'll be here in two-three hours," he reported.

Jorge would have bet that the time promised would stretch, and it did. The trains didn't get there till midafternoon. He had enough food in his pockets and pouches to keep from getting hungry before then, but he wondered if anybody would feed the soldiers on the way north. He wondered how bad the fighting would be, too. He'd served in Virginia before coming down to Tennessee. Wherever things get tough, that's where they send me. He was surprised at how little he resented that. It wasn't as if he were the only one in the same boat.

On the train, his two stripes won him a seat, even if it was hard and cramped. What with all the men standing in the aisles, he counted himself lucky. No matter how uncomfortable he was, he didn't stay awake long.

His eyes opened again when the train rolled through the town of St. Matthews. Except for a good many women wearing widow's weeds, the place seemed as untouched by the war as Beaufort. Jorge wasn't used to landscapes that hadn't been torn to bits. A town with all its buildings intact, without barricades and foxholes and trenches, seemed unnatural.

"It does, doesn't it?" Gabe Medwick said when he remarked on that. "It's like the place isn't important enough to blow up, almost."

Jorge hadn't looked at it quite like that, which didn't make Gabe wrong. He turned to ask one of the soldiers in the aisle what he thought, only to discover that the man was sound asleep standing up, much deeper under than Jorge had been on the Dixie Princess. How exhausted did you have to be to lose yourself so completely while you were upright?

After that, the train passed into North Carolina. There was a sign by the tracks that said so. The license plates on the autos went from white with blue letters and numbers to orange with black. Other than that, he couldn't see any difference. If the Confederate States had a safe haven, he was rolling through it.

Somebody at the front of the car dished out ration tins from a crate. They weren't good, but they were better than nothing. Drinks were bottles of Dr. Hopper, warm and fizzy. Jorge belched enormously.

Virginia was another sign at the border, and motorcar license plates with yellow characters on a dark green background. It was also, before long, the cratered, shattered, bombed-out landscape Jorge had grown used to. He nodded to himself. He knew what he'd be doing here.

R and R. Armstrong Grimes had gone out of the line in hostile country before. Did the people in Utah hate U.S. soldiers even more than the people here in Georgia did? He wouldn't have been surprised. But the locals here had nastier weapons with which to make their lack of affection known.

That meant Camp Freedom-the name had to be chosen with malice aforethought-had maybe the most extensive perimeter Armstrong had ever seen. Foxholes and barbed-wire emplacements and machine-gun nests and entrenchments gobbled up the fields for a couple of miles around the camp on all sides.

"Shit on toast," Squidface said as Armstrong's weary platoon made its way through the maze of outworks. "What all's inside here, the fucking United States mint?"

"They don't have soldiers, the bad guys go and take the mint away," Armstrong said.

"Well, yeah, Sarge, sure." Squidface spoke in calm, reasonable tones. "But they care about money, and they mostly don't care about us."

Armstrong grunted. It wasn't as if the PFC were wrong. Soldiers got the shitty end of the stick every day of the week, and twice on Sundays. If the other side didn't screw you, the assholes in green-gray who stayed safe behind the line would. The only people he trusted these days were smelly, dirty men in ragged uniforms that said they actually did some fighting. They knew what was what, unlike the jerks who campaigned with typewriters and telephones.

He didn't love MPs, either, not even a little bit. One of the snowdrops-he wore a white helmet and faggy white gloves-pointed and said, "Delousing station and showers are over that way. Where's your officer, anyway?"

"In the hospital." Armstrong jabbed a thumb at his own chest. "This is my outfit now."

The MP sniffed. A platoon with a sergeant in command couldn't be anything much, his attitude said. Somebody from the back of the platoon said, "Boy, Featherston's fuckers'd send him to Graves Registration in nothing flat."

"Who said that, goddammit?" the MP shouted. "I'll kick the crap out of you, whoever you are."

"Don't worry, Sergeant. I'll deal with him," Armstrong promised. All right, so the snowdrop wasn't yellow. But he didn't realize combat troops wouldn't fight fair. They'd ruin him or kill him, and then laugh about it. Getting away in a hurry was the best plan.

Back in the Great War, Armstrong's father said, delousing meant baking your clothes and bathing in scalding water full of nasty chemicals, none of which kept the lice down for long. The spray that a bored-looking corporal turned on the men now was nothing like that. But it had one advantage over the old procedure: it really worked.

There was nothing wrong with showering under scalding water. "Wish I had a steel brush, to get all the dirt off," Squidface said, snorting like a whale.

"Yeah, well, if you didn't have a goddamn pelt there, you could get clean easier," Armstrong said. Squidface was one of the hairiest guys he'd ever seen-he had more hair on his back than a lot of guys did on their chest. "If the Confederates ever kill you, they'll tan your hide for a rug."

"Ahh, your mother," Squidface said. Only somebody who'd saved Armstrong's bacon plenty of times could have got away with that. Squidface qualified. So did several other guys from the platoon.

After the shower, food. Along with canned rations, Armstrong had eaten a lot of fried and roasted chicken in the field-plenty of henhouses around, and you didn't need much more than a skillet or, in a pinch, a sharp stick to do the cooking. But this was fried chicken done right, not half raw and half burnt. The hash browns were crisp and just greasy enough, too. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen a regular potato that didn't come out of a can. Yams and sweet potatoes were all right for baking, but they just didn't cut it when you sliced them up and put them in hot lard.

And apple pie! And vanilla ice cream on top! "Goddamn!" Squidface said reverently. "I think I just came in my pants."

"I know what you mean." The size of the bite Armstrong took would have made a boa constrictor jealous.

"I want a slice of cheese to put on my pie, not ice cream," Herk said. The replacement was a veteran now, entitled to a veteran's gripes-and entitled to get razzed like a veteran, too.

"Herk wants to cut the cheese." Squidface held his nose.

"You were the one who came in your pants," Herk retorted. "Me, I want a broad."

Up and down the long table, soldiers nodded solemnly, Armstrong among them. This camp had everything for giving soldiers a good time except a whorehouse. Bluenoses made sure the U.S. Army didn't officially sponsor any such thing. If you wanted a woman, you had to find your own-which could get you killed if you picked the wrong one, and could easily leave you with a disease that would land you in big trouble when the Army found out you'd caught it.

Squidface had several suggestions on how Herk could satisfy himself, each more alarming than the one before. "Shut up already," Armstrong said after a while. "You're making me lose my appetite."

"You better show up for sick call in the mornin', Sarge," Squidface said. "Something's sure as shit wrong with you."

The line for the nightly movie was almost as long as the one for a brothel would have been. Armstrong got a seat just before they showed the newsreel. "Here is the first film from ruined Petrograd!" the announcer said importantly.

Armstrong had seen plenty of ruined cities. He'd seen Provo and Salt Lake City, and you couldn't ruin a place any worse than they got ruined. Or he thought you couldn't, till the camera panned across what was left of Petrograd. The Russian town was leveled, all the way out to the horizon. When the camera got to something that stuck up from the devastation, it moved in for a closer look.

It was an enormous bronze statue of a man on horseback-or it had been. Now it looked melted, melted from the top down. Armstrong tried to imagine what kind of heat could have done such a thing.

"This was the statue of Peter the Great, who founded Petrograd," the announcer said. "Now he demonstrates the power of our allies' scientific accomplishments."

"Fuck our allies," Squidface said. "We don't get one of those ourselves pretty damn quick, the goddamn Kaiser'll drop one on Philly next."

That struck Armstrong as a pretty good guess. He made a guess of his own: "What do you want to bet Featherston's got guys in white lab coats working on one, too? With his fucking rockets, he could throw one anywhere in the USA."

"Shit." Squidface looked around, as if expecting one of those rockets to crash down any second now. "You're right."

As a matter of fact, Armstrong was wrong. The most powerful Confederate rockets reached only a couple of hundred miles. That meant they couldn't touch most of the USA, especially since the areas C.S. soldiers actually controlled shrank by the day. But, with a bomb like that, worry outran reality with ease.

"On our side of the Atlantic…" the newsreel announcer said. The screen showed the charred wreckage of gracious homes that had to date back to long before the War of Secession. It showed sunken ships in a bombed-out harbor district. It showed dirty, unshaven Confederate soldiers shambling off into captivity.

"We was there. We seen that," Squidface said.

"Better believe it," Armstrong agreed.

"On our side of the Atlantic, the capture of Savannah cuts the Confederate States in half," the announcer said proudly. "This on the heels of the loss of Richmond…"

The Stars and Stripes flew over the wreckage of the Confederate Capitol. U.S. soldiers prowled the cratered grounds of the Gray House, walking past twisted and overturned antiaircraft guns. Scrawny civilians got meals at a U.S. field kitchen.

"How long can the enemy hope to keep up his useless resistance in the face of overwhelming U.S. might?" the announcer asked, as if the soldiers watching the newsreel would be able to tell him.

The answer they were supposed to give him was, Not very long. Armstrong had seen enough propaganda to understand that. But this time the newsreel had outsmarted itself. The fearsome bomb that leveled Petrograd made you think twice. It made Armstrong think twice, anyhow. If the Confederates came up with one of those, or more than one, before the United States could, they were liable to win the war in spite of losing their capital and getting their country cut in half. Drop something like that on Philadelphia and New York and Boston, and the United States would really have something to worry about.

Drop one on Birmingham, Armstrong thought savagely. Drop one on New Orleans. Drop one on fucking Charleston. Like most people from the USA, he particularly despised the city where the War of Secession broke out.

After the newsreel came a short feature, with the Engels Brothers involved with an actor plainly meant to be Jake Featherston. "I'll reduce your population!" he yelled, which made the Brothers get into a ridiculous brawl to see which of them would be eliminated. That was all propaganda, too, but it was funny. Armstrong and Squidface grinned at each other in the darkness.

And the main feature was a thriller, with the Confederates after the secret of a new bombsight and the heroine thwarting them at every turn. She was pretty and she had legs up to there, which might have made Armstrong root for her even if she saluted the Stars and Bars.

After the feature, he got to lie down on a real bed. He hadn't done much of that lately-oh, a few times, when he flopped in a house some Georgians had vacated, but not very often. With snoring soldiers all around him, he could relax and sleep deep. Out in the field, he might as well have been a wild beast. The least little noise would leave him not just awake but with his heart pounding and with a rifle or a knife in his hand.

Bacon and eggs and more hash browns and halfway decent coffee the next morning were wonderful, too. So was eating them without peering this way and that, afraid of holdouts and snipers and his own shadow if it caught him by surprise.

"You know, this is pretty damn good. I could really get used to this." He was surprised at how surprised he sounded.

"It is, isn't it?" Squidface sounded surprised, too. Had he been in the war from the start? Armstrong didn't know. But he'd sure been in it long enough to turn into a vet.

"I think this is called peace. We used to have it all the time." Armstrong didn't think about those days very often. He'd gone from high school almost straight into the Army. He'd been a boy then. If he wasn't a man now, he didn't suppose he ever would be.

"Not quite peace," Squidface said. "No pussy around. We went through that when we got here."

"Well, yeah, we did," Armstrong admitted. "All right, it isn't quite peace. But it beats the shit outa where we were at before." Squidface solemnly nodded and stuffed another slice of bacon into his mouth.

T hey gave George Enos shore leave after he helped bring the Tierra del Fuego back to New York City. They gave it to him, and then they forgot about him. He grabbed a train up to Boston, had a joyous reunion with Connie and the boys, and set out to enjoy himself till the Navy decided what the hell to do with him next.

The Navy took so long, George wondered whether he ought to look for a slot on a fishing boat going out of T Wharf. He could have had one in a minute; the Navy had sucked in a lot of first-class fishermen. But he had plenty of money as things were, with so much back pay and combat pay in his pocket. And if he was out a few hundred miles from shore when he got called back to active duty, there would be hard feelings all around. His wouldn't matter. The Navy's, unfortunately, would.

He was back from church one Sunday morning when the telephone in his apartment rang. He'd found he liked Catholic services. He'd converted for Connie's sake, and never expected to take the rigmarole seriously. But the fancy costumes and the Latin and the incense grew on him. If you were going to have a religion, shouldn't you have one with tradition behind it?

"I bet that's my ma," Connie said as she went to answer the call. "She was saying she wants us over for dinner… Hello?" The pause that followed stretched too long. As soon as she spoke again, her tone told George it wasn't her mother on the other end of the line: "Yes, he's here. Hold on… George! It's for you."

"I'm coming," George said. Connie's stricken face told him who the caller was likely to be. He answered formally, something he rarely did: "This is George Enos."

"Hello, Enos. This is Chief Thorvaldson, at the Navy Yard. The Oregon's going to put to sea day after tomorrow, and she's got a slot for a 40mm loader. You fit that slot, and you've had a long leave. Report aboard her by 0800 tomorrow."

"The Oregon. 0800. Right, Chief." George said what he had to say. Standing there beside him, Connie started to cry. He put his arm around her, which only made things worse.

"A battleship, Enos. You're coming up in the world," the CPO said. "You could hide your old destroyer escort in her magazines."

"Sure," George said, and hung up. He didn't much want to sail on a battleship. Like a carrier, it would draw enemy aircraft the way a dog drew fleas. But he couldn't do anything about that, either. With a sigh, he tried to smile at his wife. "We knew it was coming, babe. War's getting close to over, so I probably won't be gone real long now."

"I don't want you gone at all!" She clung to him fiercely. "And things can still go wrong at the end of a war. Look at your father."

He wished he'd never told her that story. Then he shrugged. He would have thought of it himself, too. He jumped when the telephone rang again. Connie picked it up. "Hello?…Oh, hi, Ma. God, I wish you'd been on the line a few minutes ago…Yes, we can come, but we can't stay late. George just got a call from the Navy…The Oregon. Tomorrow morning…'Bye." She hung up. "Pa's got lobsters, so it'll be a good supper, anyway."

"Won't see them in the Navy," George agreed.

Lobsters, drawn butter, corn on the cob…It wasn't quite a traditional New England boiled dinner, which didn't mean it wasn't damn good. "Enjoy it, George," Connie's father said, sliding a Narragansett ale down the table to him. "Navy chow ain't even like what the Cookie makes on a fishing boat. I know that."

"It's the truth, Mr. McGillicuddy," George said sadly. He took a pull at the cold bottle of ale. It wasn't bad, but he'd had better. He didn't say anything about that. Narragansett went back further than he did. "How long have they been brewing this stuff, anyway?"

"It's been around about as long as I have, and I was born in 1887," McGillicuddy answered. "Can't tell you exactly, 'cause I wasn't paying much attention to beer back then, but that's about it, anyhow."

"Sounds right," George said. He was born in 1910, and Narragansett had been a Boston fixture his whole life long. He took another swig from the bottle.

What with all the food and the 'Gansett, he wanted to roll over and go to sleep when he and Connie and the boys got back to their apartment. But he wanted to do something else, too, and he did. Connie would have thought something was wrong with him if he hadn't. And God only knew when he'd get another chance. "Gotta make it last," he said, lighting a cigarette to try to stretch the afterglow.

"I should hope so." Connie poked him in the ribs. "Don't want you chasing after chippies when your ship gets into some port that isn't Boston."

"Not me." George lied without hesitation. Not very often, anyway, he amended silently.

"Better not." His wife poked him again. "Give me one of those." He could reach the nightstand more easily than she could. He handed her the pack. They were Niagaras, a U.S. brand-they tasted of straw and, he swore, horse manure. But they were better than nothing. Connie leaned close to him for a light. He stroked her cheek. "Thanks," she said, whether for the smoke or the caress he didn't know.

He managed an early-morning quickie, too. Connie wouldn't have put up with that except on a day when he was shipping out. He kissed the boys good-bye-they bravely fought against the sniffles-and, duffel on his shoulder, headed across the Charles for the Boston Navy Yard.

Before he got in, Marine guards patted him down and searched the denim sack. Finding nothing more lethal than a safety razor and a clasp knife, they let him through. "Can't be too careful," one of the leathernecks said.

"Last week down in Providence, this shithead showed up in a lieutenant commander's uniform-he'd rolled the officer in an alley behind a bar. He blew up two guards-poor bastards-but he didn't get to the ships, and that's what counts."

"Story didn't make the news," George said.

"No-I guess they sat on it," the guard replied. "But one of the guys who bought a plot was my brother-in-law's best friend since they were kids. I knew Apple a little bit myself. He was a good guy."

"Apple?" George had heard a lot of nicknames, but that was a new one on him.

"Like a baby's arm holding one," the Marine explained. "Be some sad broads around, I'll tell you. Now pass on through."

Finding the Oregon was easy enough. George looked for the biggest damn ship tied up at any of the piers, and there she was: a mountain of steel bristling with guns of all sizes, up to the dozen fourteen-inchers of her main armament. She could smash anything that came within twenty miles of her-but, in these days of airplane carriers, how many enemy ships were likely to?

George shrugged; that wasn't his worry. He went up the gangplank and paused at the end. Catching the officer of the deck's eye, he said, "Permission to come aboard, sir?"

The OOD was a lieutenant. George had had a two-striper for a skipper before. "Granted," the name said. He poised pen and clipboard. "And you are…?"

"George Enos, sir."

The officer checked him off the list. "You're new, then," he said, and George nodded. The OOD went on, "What was your previous duty? And your battle station?"

"I was on a destroyer escort, sir-the Josephus Daniels. My battle station was loader on a 40mm mount. When they ordered me to duty here, they said that was where you'd put me." He knew the powers that be would do whatever they damn well pleased, but he'd got his druthers in. "I can do just about anything if I have to. I was a fisherman before the war, and I came back to the USA in the prize crew of a freighter we took in the South Atlantic."

"Uh-huh. You realize we can check all this?"

"Yes, sir. It's all in my jacket, anyway." George wasn't talking about clothes, but about the paperwork any sailor carried with him.

"Uh-huh," the OOD said again. Then he turned and called, "Caswell!"

"Yes, sir?" A petty officer materialized behind him.

"Here's Enos. Put him on the number-three 40mm mount-he's a loader. Show him where he's supposed to go for general quarters and where he can sling his hammock."

"Aye aye, sir. Come on, Enos." Caswell had a thin, clever face and cold gray eyes. George didn't think getting him mad was a good idea. You'd pay for it, and you'd keep on paying, maybe for years.

He didn't want to get the senior rating mad at him any which way. "Show me where to go and what to do, and I'll go there and do it," he said. He'd hoped for a bunk, given the size of the battlewagon, but he could live with a hammock. It wasn't as if he hadn't had one before…and the Oregon would carry a much bigger crew than the Josephus Daniels did, too.

Caswell took him to his battle station first. That he still had his duffel slung over his shoulder seemed to mean nothing to the petty officer. Caswell wasn't carrying anything himself, after all. George could see right away that the 40mm mounts on the Oregon's deck were added long after the ship was built. That was no surprise; every warship these days piled on as much AA as she could without capsizing. The number-three mount was on the port side, well forward.

George eyed the awesome bulk of the two triple fourteen-inch turrets not far away. "What's it like when they go off?" he asked.

"Loud," Caswell said, and said no more. No shit, George thought. That boom would probably blow the fillings out of your teeth, and maybe the hair off your head. He didn't want to think about the big guns going off when he had a hangover. If that didn't kill you, you'd wish it would.

He looked up and down the deck. Yeah, there was a lot of antiaircraft: 40mms, and.50-caliber and.30-caliber machine guns as well. And the five-inch guns of the secondary armament could fire AA rounds, too. "Anybody bores in on us, we can make him mighty unhappy," he remarked.

"We better," the petty officer replied. "We fuck up once, we're toast." That was nothing but the truth. A well-placed bomb could sink even this floating, fighting fortress. Caswell lit a cigarette. He didn't offer George one, but he did say, "Come on. I'll take you below."

There were bunks on the Oregon. But there were also lots of hammocks. Since George was a new fish here, his getting one was no man-bites-dog story. The sailors on either side of him seemed good enough guys-a hell of a lot friendlier than Caswell, that was for sure.

"Give me the straight skinny," George said to one of them, a broad-shouldered man who went by Country. "Is she a madhouse or is she a home?"

"She's a home…mostly." Country's harsh Midwestern accent said he hadn't grown up near the sea.

"Mostly? When do things go wrong?"

The other sailor tipped him a wink. "You'll find out," he said, and that was all George could get out of him.

L ieutenant-Colonel Jerry Dover looked around at the latest place his supply dump had come to rest. He looked at Pete, who'd done a hell of a lot of retreating with him. "From Edwardsville to Albertville," Dover said. "Reckon that'd make a good title for my memoirs when I write 'em up?"

"For your what?" The quartermaster sergeant gave him a blank look. "This Albertville place don't look like it's good for squat."

"It's bigger than Edwardsville," Dover said. Pete couldn't very well argue. Edwardsville had had only a couple of hundred people in it. Albertville, northwest of the other town-on the road to Huntsville, in other words-had three, maybe even four, thousand. It boasted a cotton gin and a cotton mill and a cottonseed-oil plant and a cornmeal mill. The local high school bragged about how it trained future farmers.

While Pete didn't argue, he didn't seem much impressed, either. "Horseshit's bigger'n dogshit, too, but shit's still shit, you ask me." He pulled out a pack of Raleighs. With Kentucky and Tennessee lost, with North Carolina cut off from Alabama, even good tobacco was getting scarce. Seeing Dover's longing expression, he gave his superior a smoke and a light. After his drag, he added, "And the Confederate States are in deep shit right now, and that's the God's truth."

"You think I'm gonna pat you on the ass and go, 'No, no, everything's fine,' you're out of your tree," Dover answered. "They're already knocking Birmingham flat. If we lose Huntsville, too…"

"We're fucked," Pete finished for him. "Without the rockets, we can't do anything against the damnyankees."

"Yeah." Jerry Dover smoked in quick, worried puffs. "If Birmingham and Huntsville go, what's left? New Orleans and Little Rock and Texas. God Himself couldn't lick the USA with New Orleans and Little Rock and Texas, and I bet He wouldn't be fool enough to try. Which is more than I can say for Jake Featherston."

Pete looked around nervously. "Jeez, sir, careful how you talk. You seen how many soldiers they've hanged from trees with DEFEATIST around their necks?"

"They won't hang me-or you, either," Dover said. "We're still doing our jobs-and we're doing 'em pretty goddamn well, too. That's a hell of a lot more than most people can say-including the President. Wasn't either one of us who lost Richmond."

"He says we'll get it back," Pete said.

"Freedom!" Dover replied-without a doubt, the most sardonic Party salutation in the history of the CSA. In one politically safe word, he called everybody who'd ever believed anything Jake Featherston said an idiot. He'd believed some of those things himself-not all of them, but some-so he knew he was an idiot, too.

Pete cocked his head to one side, like a bird dog taking a scent. "Firing's picking up at the front."

Jerry Dover listened, too. "Shit. You're right. Yankees are laying down more artillery than they've used for a while. If that doesn't mean another push is on its way…"

"Can't afford many more," Pete said.

"Any more," Dover corrected. "If they start shelling Huntsville and bombing it, how's it going to keep doing what it's got to do?"

Before Pete could answer, Dover's field telephone jangled. The noncom sketched a salute and ducked out of Dover's tent. "Albertville supply depot here," Dover said as he picked up the telephone. He listened, then answered, "I'm light on 105 shells, but I'll send you what I've got." He yelled for Pete to come back. Would Cicero Sawyer be able to get him more artillery rounds after he sent off what he had here? He had to hope so.

"I'll get 'em moving," Pete promised when Dover told him what he needed. "We don't have as many as I wish we did, though."

"Yeah, I know. I said the same thing," Dover answered. "Anything is better than nothing, though."

Was anything enough better than nothing? Dover didn't know. Once more, he had to hope. The telephone rang again, and then again. The soldiers farther forward sounded more and more desperate. "Things are falling apart up here!" one of them yelled.

"We can't hold!" another cried.

"I'll send what I can," Dover said, and rang up Huntsville. "Whatever you've got," he told Sawyer. "They're taking it on the chin here."

"I'll do what I can," Cicero Sawyer answered, sounding much like Dover himself. "We aren't getting stuff as fast as I wish we would, either."

"Great." Dover meant anything but what he said. "How are we supposed to fight a war if we don't have anything to fight with?"

"Good question," Sawyer said. "If you don't have any other good questions, class is dismissed." He hung up.

Swearing, so did Jerry Dover. After he finished cussing, he checked to see how many clips he had for his automatic rifle. He had the bad feeling he might need it before long.

The next time he saw Pete, he noticed the noncom was carrying a submachine gun. Pete's eyes went to his weapon, too. Neither of them said anything. If you didn't talk about what worried you, maybe it would go away and leave you alone.

Or maybe it wouldn't.

As he'd learned to do in the last war, Dover tracked the battle with his ears. He didn't like what he was hearing. The Yankees seemed to be pushing forward, straight toward his dump. And they seemed to be outflanking it on both sides.

A corporal came up to him. "Sir, shouldn't we be getting ready to pull out of here?"

"Yeah, I guess maybe we should." He'd had to move or abandon a lot of dumps in the Confederacy's grinding retreat. He wondered why he was dicking around with this one.

A staff car-a butternut Birmingham packed to the gills with officers and men-rattled up to the supply dump. "Get the hell out while you still can!" somebody yelled from inside. "The damnyankees're right on our ass!" The auto jounced away. The load it carried was too much for its springs.

Maybe the load Dover carried was too much for his. But he started shouting the orders he'd used so often before: "Set the time charges in the ammo! Start blowing up the supplies! Come on, dammit! We've got to get out of here, see where else we can make a stand."

Shells started landing close by. Then machine-gun bullets snapped and whined past his head-not aimed fire, not yet, but they meant U.S. soldiers sure as hell were too damn close. Before long, the Yankees would see what they were aiming at, and that wouldn't be good. And the rounds were coming in from three sides, not just from the front.

"Fuck," Dover muttered. He really had waited too long this time. He raised his voice to a shout: "Get out, men! Save yourselves!"

He'd just gotten in a truckload of new-model field telephones, lighter and better all around than the ones that had soldiered through the war. They still sat in their crates; he hadn't had a chance to send any of them forward yet. He shot them up, one short burst at a time. If his own side couldn't use them, he was damned if he'd let the bastards in green-gray get them.

"Come on, sir! Let's get out of here!" Pete sat behind the wheel of another military Birmingham. The irony of the auto's name struck home for the first time, here much too close to the city where it was made. Dover hopped in. Pete headed northwest, toward Huntsville.

They got maybe a quarter of a mile up one of the most godawful roads Dover's kidneys had ever met when a burst of machine-gun fire off to one side made the quartermaster sergeant grunt. Pete slumped over, half his head blown off. The Birmingham started limping as if it had a flat-later, Dover found out it had two. With no one controlling it, it slewed off the bumpy asphalt and hit a pine tree. Luckily, it wasn't going very fast. Dover was bruised and shaken, but not hurt. He bailed out.

"Hold it right there, motherfucker!" somebody with a U.S. accent yelled. "Drop that piece, or you're dead meat!"

Dover froze. He looked around wildly for somewhere to run, somewhere to hide. If he moved, the hidden Yankee could plug him before he took more than a couple of steps. Slowly and carefully, he set the automatic Tredegar on the ground. "I've got a pistol on my belt," he called. "I'm going to take it out and put it with the rifle."

"Don't get cute with it, asshole." That was another U.S. soldier, one with a deep bass rasp. Jerry Dover couldn't see him. "We got enough firepower to saw you in half like a fuckin' board."

"The last person who thought I was cute was my mother," Dover said, which won him raucous laughter from the unseen enemy troopers. Holding his.45 between thumb and forefinger, he laid it down next to the rifle. Then, without being asked, he raised his hands above his head. "You got me."

Not two but four U.S. soldiers cautiously came out of the bushes. Two of them had leaves and branches on their helmets, held in place with strips of inner tube. Two carried ordinary Springfields; one a heavy, clunky U.S. submachine gun; and one a captured C.S. automatic rifle. They all needed shaves. They smelled of old sweat and leather and tobacco and mud: like soldiers, in other words.

"Son of a bitch," one of them said as they drew near. "We got us a light colonel." The two stars on either side of Dover's collar weren't made to be visible from very far off. Why let snipers pick out officers the easy way?

"Cough up your ammo," said the guy with the Confederate weapon. Without a word, Dover gave him the clips he had left after shooting up the field telephones. His captors also relieved him of watch and wallet and cigarettes. He went right on keeping quiet. They weren't supposed to do that, but it happened all the time. And they didn't have to take him prisoner. He could end up dead if any one of them decided to pull the trigger.

"I guess we oughta send him back," said the one with the deep voice. He was a corporal, and one of the pair with leaves nodding above his head. "Officer like that, the guys in Intelligence can squeeze some good shit out of him."

"Maybe." The Yankee with the submachine gun aimed it at Dover's face. "Who are you, buddy? What do you do? C'mon. Sing."

"My name is Jerry Dover. I'm a lieutenant colonel." Dover rattled off his pay number. "I ran the supply dump back there by Albertville." According to the Geneva Convention, he didn't have to say that. Self-preservation argued it would be a good idea.

"Quartermaster, huh? No wonder you got good smokes," the one with the deep voice said. He turned to the guy with the automatic rifle. "Take him back to battalion HQ, Rudy. Don't plug him unless he tries to bug out."

"Gotcha," Rudy said. He gestured with the captured weapon. "Get movin', Pops. You run, it's the last dumbass stunt you pull."

"I'm not going anywhere, except wherever you take me," Dover said. He was so relieved not to get shot out of hand, he didn't even resent the Pops. He was old enough to be the damnyankee's father. "Will you please bury my sergeant there?" he asked his captors, pointing to the Birmingham. "He was a good man."

"We round up some more of you butternut bastards, they can take care of it," the corporal said. The Yankees weren't going to dig for an enemy themselves.

"Move it," Rudy said. Hands still high, Jerry Dover trudged off into captivity.

D uring the last war, Chester Martin remembered, the Confederates had seen the writing on the wall in northern Virginia. As the summer of 1917 went on, the spirit gradually leaked out of the men in butternut. They wouldn't stand and fight till they couldn't fight any more, the way they had earlier. They would throw away their rifles and put up their hands and hope their U.S. opposite numbers didn't murder them.

The same thing was happening in Georgia now. Even some of the Freedom Party Guards had the message: the Confederate States weren't going to win this time around, either. Some of the men in brown-splotched camouflage smocks had a hard time surrendering. But then, anybody who tried to surrender to Lieutenant Lavochkin had a hard time.

Chester admired the platoon leader's courage. Past that…If everybody on the U.S. side were like Boris Lavochkin, the war probably wouldn't have been anywhere near so tough. But Chester didn't think he wanted to live in a country that produced a lot of men like that. Living with one of them was tough enough.

Getting to Savannah seemed to have amounted to the be-all and end-all of General Morrell's strategy. Once the port fell, once the sickle slice cut the Confederacy in half, things were confused for a while. The powers that be needed some time to figure out what to do next. After you went to bed with the girl of your dreams, what did you say when you woke up beside her in the morning?

Martin's platoon, along with the rest of the regiment and a couple of more besides, crossed the Savannah River and went up into South Carolina. The swamps on that side of the river seemed no different from the ones in Georgia. The people over there spoke with the same mushy drawl. They hated damnyankees just as much as the Georgians did, even if they hadn't been able to muster more than a few soldiers to try to keep the invaders in green-gray out of their state.

"South Carolina seceded first, boys," Captain Rhodes told the company. "This goddamn state got the CSA rolling. Been a hell of a long time since then, but we finally get to pay the bastards back."

As far as Martin was concerned, too much water had gone under the bridge to care about which drop went first. What difference did it make now? He despised all the Confederate states equally. Why not? Men from each and every one of them were equally eager to do him in.

What did give him chills were the empty villages through which his outfit passed. He'd seen the like in Georgia. Once upon a time-say, up until a couple of years earlier-Negro sharecroppers had lived in them. Those people were almost all gone. He would have bet dollars to doughnuts they were almost all dead. Before long, their flimsy shacks would crumble and fall down, and then who would remember that they'd ever lived here?

Local whites didn't want to. Lieutenant Lavochkin brought the mayor of a little town called Hardeeville to a nameless village a couple of miles away. The mayor didn't want to come; a rifle to the back of his head proved amazingly persuasive.

"What happened to these people?" Lavochkin demanded.

"Well, I don't rightly know." The mayor was a white-mustached fellow named Darius Douglas. He walked with a limp that probably meant he had a Purple Heart stashed in a drawer somewhere.

"What do you mean, you don't know?" Lavochkin rapped out. "You suppose they all decided to go on vacation at the same time?"

Douglas had fine, fair skin. When he turned red, the flush was easy to see. "Well, I reckon not," he admitted. "But a lot of 'em was gone a while back, off to towns and such. The fancier the farm machinery got, the fewer the niggers we needed."

"How come we didn't see 'em in Savannah, then?" The lieutenant's voice was silky with danger. "How come we don't see 'em anywhere? How many niggers you got in Hardeeville, damn you?"

"Don't have any, I don't reckon, but we never did," Darius Douglas answered. "Hardeeville, it's a white folks' town. Niggers came in to work, but they didn't live there. They lived in places like this here."

"Do you know what you are? You're a lying sack of shit, that's what," Lieutenant Lavochkin snarled. "If you came out and said, 'Yeah, we killed 'em, and I don't miss 'em a fucking bit,' at least you'd be honest. This way…Christ, you know what you assholes did, but it makes you jumpy enough so you don't want to own up to it, not when you're talking to people like me."

"I always knew damnyankees was nigger-lovers," the mayor of Hardeeville said. "Nobody else'd make such a fuss over a bunch o' damn coons."

"Yeah? So who's gonna make a fuss over you?" Lavochkin asked. Before Mayor Douglas could answer, the U.S. officer shot him in the face. Douglas dropped like a sack of beans in the middle of a muddy, overgrown street.

"Jesus!" Chester Martin exclaimed. "What the hell'd you go and do that for…sir?"

The platoon commander looked at him-looked through him, really. "You going to tell me he didn't have it coming?"

"Jesus," Martin said again. "I dunno. He didn't kill any of those coons himself, I don't think." The late Mr. Douglas was still twitching a little, and still bleeding, too. The iron stink of blood mingled with the foulness of bowels that had just let go.

"No, he didn't kill 'em. He just waved bye-bye when they went off to the camps," Lavochkin said. "All these Confederate cocksuckers did the same goddamn thing. Far as I'm concerned, they all deserve a bullet in the head."

As far as Martin was concerned, that had nothing to do with anything. "We deal with that after the war's over, sir. You start shooting civilians for the hell of it, we're going to have reprisals come down on our heads, and we need that kind of crap like we need a root canal."

Lavochkin grunted. "I'm not afraid of these assholes. They're whipped."

"How many replacements do we need right now?" Chester asked. The lieutenant grunted again. "They haven't all quit yet, so let's not fire 'em up. What do you say to that?"

He could tell what Lieutenant Lavochkin wanted to say. Lavochkin wanted to call him yellow, but damn well couldn't. Scowling, the lieutenant did say, "If I'm not a good boy, I don't get promoted, right? You think I give a flying fuck about that?"

Chester shrugged. He hoped Lavochkin did. It was the only hold he had on the cold-blooded young officer. Lieutenant Lavochkin liked killing too much, and Chester didn't know what he could do about it. Yeah, you killed in a war-that was what it was all about. But the guys who enjoyed it caused more trouble than they solved. Martin wondered whether the platoon commander needed to have an unfortunate accident.

He didn't let that show on his face. If he had, he was sure Lieutenant Lavochkin would have plugged him with as little remorse as he'd shot Darius Douglas. If I have to take him out, I can't fuck up, 'cause I'll only get one chance, Martin thought unhappily.

"Let's go back to Hardeeville," Lavochkin said, which was anything but a retreat.

"What will you say when the people ask what happened to the mayor?" Chester wondered.

"Shot resisting U.S. authority." The lieutenant's voice remained hard and firm. He didn't sound the least bit guilty. Chester wondered whether he knew how to feel guilty. The first sergeant wouldn't have bet on it. As far as Lavochkin was concerned, anything he did was right because he did it. How did that make him any different from Jake Featherston, except that Featherston had more scope for running wild than an infantry lieutenant did?

"Come on, you guys," Chester called to the men in the platoon. "You heard the lieutenant-we're heading back to Hardeeville. Keep your eyes open when we get there, in case of trouble." In case the locals go nuts because we scragged the mayor. He didn't say that, but he hoped the men could work it out for themselves.

Most of them seemed able to. They tramped back toward the little town as if advancing into battle. They moved in small groups, warily, keeping an eye out ahead and to all sides.

Hardeeville was a block of shops, a filling station, a saloon, and a few houses. Before the war, it might have held two or three hundred people. With the men anywhere close to military age gone, it was smaller than that now. When the mayor's wife saw the U.S. soldiers coming back without him, she screeched, "Where's Darius?"

"Dead," Lavochkin said flatly. "He resisted our authority, and-" Whatever he said after that, Mrs. Douglas' shriek smothered it. She made a fuss over the late mayor.

A shot rang out from one of the houses. A U.S. soldier went down, grabbing his leg. "Shit!" he yelled. Chester didn't think the cartridge was anything more than a.22, but that didn't mean it felt like a kiss.

Three soldiers with automatic rifles emptied their magazines into the front of the house. Glass and chunks of wood flew. A woman and a twelve-year-old boy staggered out. Both of them were bleeding. The boy still clutched the.22. He tried to raise it and shoot at the U.S. soldiers again, but he fell over instead, blood puddling under him.

"Fuck," said one of the men in green-gray. He was no happier about shooting a kid than anyone else would have been. Yeah, the kid had fired first. Yeah, he was an enemy. That didn't make it much better.

Had things ended there, they would have been bad. But they didn't. They got worse. Somebody fired from another house. A Featherston Fizz came flying out of nowhere and burst at the feet of a U.S. soldier. He screamed like a damned soul as flames engulfed him. And one of the old men in Hardeeville laughed.

"Take 'em out!" Lieutenant Lavochkin yelled. "Take 'em all out!"

Chester's first shot knocked over the old man who thought watching a Yankee burn was funny. His second shot hit the old woman next to the old man right in the middle of the chest. She crumpled before she had a chance to screech. Of course, Chester's wasn't the only bullet that hit her-not even close. All the soldiers in the platoon were letting go with everything they had.

They started throwing grenades into the houses closest to them. A couple of men had grenade launchers on their rifles. They lobbed grenades all over Hardeeville, almost at random. "It'll come down on somebody's head!" one of them whooped as he pulled the trigger and sent one off…somewhere.

The men and women and kids on the street went down as if scythed. Their dying cries-and the gunfire, and the grenades bursting randomly all over the little town-brought more people out to see what was going on. The U.S. soldiers shot them down, too.

It was madness, red-hot madness. Chester Martin felt it as he fired and reloaded, fired and reloaded, and slapped in clip after clip. He didn't know how many Confederates he killed. He didn't much care, either. Along with his buddies, he went through the town. By the time they got done, there wasn't much town left-it burned behind them. And just about everybody who'd lived in Hardeeville was dead.

Chester stood there shaking his head, like a man whose fever had suddenly broken. "Wow," he said, looking back on the devastation. "What did we just do?"

"Settled their hash," Lieutenant Lavochkin answered. "I don't think too much of this needs to go into the after-action report, do you?"

"Christ, no!" Chester thought about some of the things he'd just done. He wished he hadn't. He wished he hadn't done them, too. So, no doubt, did Hardeeville. Well, it was too late for him, and much too late for the little town. He had the rest of his life to try to forget. Hardeeville…didn't, not any more.

C onfederate Connie was on the air again. To most people in the USA, the music the propaganda broadcaster played was hot stuff, at or past the cutting edge. Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Moss-he was still getting used to the silver oak leaves on his shoulder straps-had heard stranger, wilder rhythms when Spartacus' guerrillas got their hands on a guitar and a fiddle.

Here he was, at a big air base just outside of Dayton, Ohio, not far from where the Confederates swarmed over the border not quite three years before. The base didn't exist then. Now, unless the Kaiser's airmen had something fancier, it was the biggest training center in the world.

The song ended. Like most of the other guys at the base, Moss thought listening to Confederate Connie was more fun anyway. She had a contralto like a wet dream.

"Well, you Yankee boys, aren't you proud of yourselves?" she said, as if she were waiting for you to get back into bed with her and didn't want to wait very long. She was probably fifty-five and frumpy, but she sure didn't sound that way. "Your brave soldiers went and wiped Hardeeville right off the map."

"Where the hell's Hardeeville?" somebody asked.

"Shut up," said Moss and two other men. Listening to Confederate Connie didn't just remind you why you fought. It reminded you why you were alive.

"That's right," she went on. "They marched into a defenseless town and they murdered everybody in it-men, women, children, everybody. Then they burned it down on top of the bodies. No more Hardeeville, South Carolina. Gone. Right off the map. Some fun, hey? Aren't you proud to live in a country that does stuff like that?"

Nobody could keep the men around the wireless set quiet after that. "Oh, yeah, like the CSA never murdered anybody!" a pilot said.

"Where's your coons, you lying cunt?" somebody else added.

"If they killed everybody, how come you know it happened?" demanded yet another flier.

Confederate Connie actually answered the last question, saying, "The Yankees missed a couple of women, though. They played dead in the blood and then got away. And now, to make you feel good about what your boys in green-gray managed to do, here's a tune by Smooth Steve and the Oiler Orchestra, 'How about That?'"

Music blared from the wireless, more of the syncopated noise the Confederates liked better than most people in the USA did. Jonathan Moss listened with at most half an ear. He wasn't the only one; plenty of people were still telling Confederate Connie what a liar she was.

Moss wasn't so sure. He'd heard enough war stories to believe a unit could go hog wild and massacre anybody who got in its way. He didn't believe troops would do anything like that just for the fun of it. If somebody in Hardeeville had fired at them, though…In that case, the town was what soldiers called shit out of luck. Probably all the men who'd torn up the place wished they hadn't done it-now. That was liable to be a little late for Hardeeville's innocent-and not so innocent-civilians.

A fellow with a bombardier's badge above the right pocket of his tunic said, "What's she getting her tit in a wringer for, anyway? I bet I blow up more people three times a week than those ground-pounders did. But I do it from twenty thousand feet, so I'm a fuckin' hero. It's a rough old war."

Along with the bombardier's badge, he wore the ribbons for a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star with an oak-leaf cluster. If he wasn't a hero, he would do till the genuine article came along. He also had a view of the war cynical enough to give even Moss pause.

The next morning, Moss got summoned to the commandant's office. He wondered how he'd managed to draw that worthy's notice, and what kind of trouble he was in. Major General Barton K. Yount was a sixtyish fellow who might have looked like a kindly grandfather if he weren't in uniform. "Have a seat, Moss," he said. His accent suggested he'd been born somewhere not far from here.

"Thank you, sir," Moss said cautiously, and sat with just as much care. The condemned man got a hearty meal went through his mind.

General Yount must have realized what he was thinking. "I didn't call you in here to ream you out, Colonel," he said. "I want to ask you a question."

"Sir?" The less Moss said, the less he might have to regret later on.

But Yount came straight to the point: "You've flown a lot of different airplanes, haven't you?"

"Well, yes, sir. I started with a pusher job in 1914, and I'm still doing it, so I must have, eh?"

"That's right." Yount smiled and nodded. "How would you like to add a turbo job to the list?"

A crazy grin spread across Moss' face. "Sir, I'd kill for a chance like that. Only reason I haven't is, I didn't know who needed bumping off."

Turbos were going to turn propeller-driven airplanes obsolete as soon as the boys with the slide rules and the thick glasses worked the gremlins out of them. They were already sixty or eighty miles an hour faster than the hottest prop-driven fighters. The drawbacks were unreliable engines and landing gear, among other things. Turbos were widowmakers on a scale that hadn't been seen since the early days of the Great War. Moss was one of thousands of pilots who didn't give a damn. He wanted that chance so bad he could taste it.

Major General Yount's smile got wider. He knew Moss was kidding…up to a point. "You've got it, Colonel. You can call it a reward for a hard time, if you like. There's one thing I do have to warn you about, though."

"What? That it's dangerous? I already know, sir. I'm ready to take the chance."

"No, no." The training commandant shook his head. "I assumed you knew that. But you also have to know that for the time being we aren't using turbo fighters anywhere except above U.S.-occupied territory. If you get shot down or forced to crash-land because of engine trouble, we don't want this machinery falling into enemy hands. You must agree to that before you begin flight training here."

"Oh." Moss didn't try to hide his disappointment. "I wanted to go hunting."

"I understand that. You wouldn't be a good fighter pilot if you didn't. But I hope you follow the reasoning behind the order."

"Yes, sir," Moss said reluctantly. Even more reluctantly, he added, "All right, sir. I agree to the condition."

"Good. In that case, report to Building Twelve at 0730 tomorrow morning. You'll learn about the care and feeding of your new beast."

Several turbo fighters sat on the runway outside of Building Twelve. Moss got there early so he could walk around them before he went in. They looked weird as hell. The fuselage was almost shark-shaped. The wings swept back from root to tip. He'd never seen or imagined anything like that before. The turbos had no tailwheel. They sat on a nosewheel instead, so the fuselage rested parallel to the ground instead of sloping down from nose to tail. The engines sat in metal pods under the wings. Yeah, the new fighter was one peculiar bird. But the longer Moss stared, the more he nodded to himself. It might look different, but it also looked deadly.

He wasn't the only pilot giving the new airplanes a once-over. "Fly one yet?" he asked a much-decorated major.

"Yeah," the younger man answered.

"What's it like?"

"Like your first girl after you've been jacking off too goddamn long."

Moss laughed. That wasn't what he'd expected, but he liked the way it sounded. He went into the building to hear about the care and feeding of the Boeing-71, as the new turbo was officially known. The major doing the lecturing had some fresh and nasty burn scars on his left arm, and walked with a limp. Moss wondered if he'd got hurt in a turbo, but didn't ask. He didn't really want to know. Nobody else seemed curious, either.

He learned about the instruments, about the guns (four 30mm cannon in the nose-one hell of a punch), about the strange and temperamental landing gear, about what to do if an engine quit or caught fire, about what to do if both engines went out (not the most encouraging bit of instruction he'd ever had), about tactics against the Confederates' hottest prop-driven Hound Dogs, about everything he needed to know before he plopped his butt down in the cramped-looking cockpit.

He had to make himself listen. He knew he was hearing all kinds of stuff that would help keep him alive. He was a pro; he understood that. Even so, all he wanted to do was get in there and find out what the bird could do.

After what seemed forever and was only a week, he got his chance in a two-seat trainer. U.S. armies had driven the Confederates out of Petersburg. Birmingham and Huntsville were under artillery assault. Moss wondered if there'd be any enemy airplanes left for him to face when he finally went on duty in the new turbo-people were calling them Screaming Eagles, and the brass didn't seem to mind too much.

The noise inside the cockpit was different. He felt it all through his body instead of just hearing it. He gave the turbo some throttle. It raced down the runway-it needed half again as much tarmac as a prop job. As he came up to takeoff speed, the instructor said, "Ease the stick back. Not too much, now. You do everything by little bits with this baby."

"Right," Moss said, and then he was airborne. He gunned the turbo a little. When he felt what happened, he whispered, "Ohh." Sure as hell, the murmur wasn't much different from the one he'd made as he first slid into Beth Sullivan when he was seventeen. He'd forgotten you could mix so much delight and awe and astonishment.

The instructor chuckled. How many other pilots had made that same sound in his earphones? "It's something, isn't it?" he said.

"Wow," Moss answered, which wasn't a hell of a lot more articulate. After a moment, he tried again: "It's like angels are pushing."

"It is, isn't it?" Now the instructor sounded thoughtful; he hadn't heard that before, anyway. He paused for a moment, then said, "Remember, they can turn into devils in nothing flat if you screw up-or even if you don't. Sometimes only God knows why the engines flame out or throw a rotor or just up and quit. And if you don't want to be asking Him face-to-face, you've got to get out of the bird in a hurry."

"I understand," Moss said. The single-seat Screaming Eagle had one of the nicest cockpit canopies he'd ever seen, a sleekly streamlined armor-glass bubble. The trainer's canopy was longer and more bulbous, to accommodate the longer cockpit with two men. Could you yank it back quick enough to bail out? He hoped so.

At the instructor's command, he swung the turbo into a turn. You couldn't come close to turning as tight as you could in a prop job. But you wouldn't want to dogfight in a Screaming Eagle anyway, not when you could outdive, outclimb, and just plain outrun anything else in the air.

Landing with a nosewheel as the first flight ended felt strange, but he did it. He couldn't stop smiling when he got out of the fighter. If this wasn't love, what was it?