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XII

When George Enos, Jr., joined the Navy, he thought he would go aboard a warship right away. Why not? He'd been a seaman for years. What more did he need to know? In his mind, the answer to that was nothing. The Navy had other ideas.

The Navy's ideas won. When the Navy's ideas bumped up against his, they always won. That was annoying, but it was how things worked.

It was also one of the things he had to learn before he could go from fisherman to Navy man. As the saying went, there was a right way, a wrong way, and a Navy way. If you did things the Navy way, you couldn't get in too much trouble. The training camp outside Providence drove that home.

George had been hundreds of miles out to sea. Except for his honeymoon at Niagara Falls, the train ride to Providence was the longest one he'd ever made. He was jammed up against a window. He liked that fine, except when he had to fight his way to the aisle to go to the toilet. Otherwise, he pressed his nose to the dirty, smeary glass and gaped at the countryside rolling by.

Training camp wasn't what he'd expected, either. The Navy seemed determined to make soldiers, not sailors, out of its recruits. George didn't mind the calisthenics, though the fellows ten years younger than he was had an easier time with them. He didn't mind making his cot up just so; he understood the need to keep things tidy in cramped places. He did mind the endless marching in formation. He saw no point to it. "Are we going to do close-order drill on a battleship deck, for crying out loud?" he grumbled one hot, sticky evening before lights-out.

"You know what it is? I'll tell you what it is," a skinny New York kid named Morris Fishbein said. His accent and George's were much further apart from each other than the miles separating their home towns; sometimes they hardly seemed to be speaking the same language. "They want to pound the individualism out of us, that's what they want to do."

"What do you mean?" George asked.

Before answering, Fishbein lit a cigarette. He smoked in quick, nervous puffs. Everything he did seemed fast and herky-jerky. His thoughts went the same way, leaping over the mental landscape where George had to plod one mental step at a time. Blowing out smoke, Fishbein said, "Only stands to reason. We all gotta act the same way on a ship. We all gotta do what they tell us, no matter what the hell it is, without even thinking about it. We don't do that, we get in trouble and maybe we put the ship in trouble. We gotta do it automatic-like, you know what I mean? So that's what close-order drill is for."

Maybe he was right. Maybe he was wrong. Right or wrong, he was sure as hell plausible. When George was marching and countermarching and turning to the left flank and the right, he didn't feel like an individual. He barely felt like a human being. He was just one gear in an enormous machine where all the pieces worked smoothly together. Maybe that was what Fishbein was talking about.

Every once in a while, something would go wrong in the machinery. Somebody would turn right when he should have turned left, or else keep going straight when he should have countermarched. What happened to such luckless people didn't bear thinking about. CPOs descended on them like a swarm of cats on a mouse. The abuse they screamed startled George, who'd been working at T Wharf and going to sea since before he started shaving, and who thought he'd heard it all.

"They should treat us better," he complained.

"Yeah, and then you wake up," Morrie Fishbein said scornfully. "All we're there for is to get work out of us. Military proletariat is what we are. They don't have to treat us good. We fuck up, they replace us."

"You talk too much like that, they'll come down on you," George said.

"I'm a Socialist. So what? So's the President. It's still a free country-more or less. I'm not talking about the revolt of the proletariat. I don't want that. I want to blow the reactionaries in the goddamn CSA to hell and gone. We need an Army and a Navy for the job. But I know a class structure when I see one."

A big, slow-talking Midwesterner named Oswald Schmidt said, "I know something you don't know." His flat accent sounded nothing like George's or Fishbein's.

"Oh, yeah? What's that?" Fishbein bristled at the very idea.

"I know you talk too goddamn much."

It could have been the start of a fight. But everybody who heard it laughed too hard for anything to get started. And everybody except possibly Morris Fishbein knew he did talk too much.

Reveille at half past five made a lot of people groan every morning. George took it in stride. He put in longer hours at sea than the Navy made him put up with. Navy cooks weren't anything special-they couldn't very well be, not cooking for so many men. But quantity counted, too. Bacon and eggs and fried potatoes and plenty of coffee made the day worth facing.

George also learned to shoot a Springfield as if he were in the Army. He supposed that gave him a certain mental discipline, too. From rifles, he graduated to machine guns, and then to one-pounder antiaircraft guns. He felt a certain thrill firing one of those-his father had helped tend the same kind of weapon in the Great War.

Some of the recruits had no idea how to take care of weapons, or how to fix them when part of their mechanism went out of whack. George had no problems there. Any fisherman had to be a pretty good jackleg mechanic. If something broke down while you were out on the Grand Bank, you couldn't take it to the nearest repairman. You damn well had to fix it yourself, with whatever you had on your boat.

A couple of petty officers noticed that George's hands knew what they were doing. "Keep that up and you'll be a machinist's mate in jig time," one of them said.

"I don't much want to be a machinist's mate," George answered.

"Why not? People who can put things back together like you don't grow on trees. The Navy needs as many of 'em as it can get," the chief said, scowling at George for daring to have a mind of his own.

George shrugged. "If I have my druthers, I'll be a gunner. That's what my father was. Besides, I'd sooner blow up the other guys if I'm going to be in the scrap at all."

The chief stuck out his chin farther than should have been humanly possible. "Listen, Enos, you're in the Navy now. You don't get your druthers, and you ain't gonna have 'em, neither. You'll do what we tell you, or else you'll be the sorriest son of a bitch ever born-and then you'll do what we tell you. You got that?"

"Yes, Chief Isbell. Sure do." George knew better than to come right out and argue. That would have asked to get his square peg self rammed into a round hole. But he didn't volunteer for special machinist's training, either. He wondered if anybody would volunteer him. No one did. He let out a discreet sigh of relief, making sure none of the fearsome chiefs could hear him when he did it.

Before long, the raw seamen started training cruises in a destroyer that hadn't been new in the Great War and was downright ancient now. The Lamson's decrepitude made her a better ship to learn in than a newer vessel would have been. Things were always going wrong with her. Her hull wasn't much more than rust covered by paint. That gave the aspiring sailors endless practice at chipping paint and polishing metal, two skills any seaman needed.

She was so old, she burned coal. George did a stretch in the black gang, shoveling it into her furnace. He came off those shifts exhausted and looking like the end man in a minstrel show. He coughed up black-streaked phlegm for days afterwards.

Once upon a time, the Lamson had been able to make twenty-eight knots. The only way she could do that these days was by falling off a cliff. Her boilers had more wheezes than a sanatorium full of consumptives. George knew diesels, but he'd never worked with steam before. He found himself interested in spite of his vow to steer himself toward gunnery.

He had a hammock and a duffel bag to call his own: even less in the way of space and belongings than he'd had on the Sweet Sue. For him, though, the adjustment was small. Some of the landsmen groused all the time. A couple of them just couldn't take it. They'd managed the barracks outside of Providence, but couldn't stand the even tighter quarters at sea.

Or maybe it was the heads that did them in. They had no partitions. You did your business sitting next to somebody else who was doing his business, and if what you saw and heard and smelled put you off your stride, you got more and more constipated. The pharmacist's mates did a booming-so to speak-business in castor oil.

The Lamson had five three-inch guns. They hadn't been much back when she was built, and they were only popguns by today's standards. But they were big enough to give the crew practice at loading, firing, and shooting real artillery pieces.

An ensign with peach fuzz on his cheeks asked, "What would you do, men, if we were attacked by a British cruiser?"

Get blown to hell and gone, George thought, but that probably wasn't what the baby-faced officer wanted to hear. Morrie Fishbein said, "Launch torpedoes, sir. They'd be our best chance against anything that outgunned us by so much."

The ensign frowned. That was a good answer, but not the one he'd been looking for. He said, "But how would you fight back with our guns?"

"Shoot like hell and hope for the best, sir," Fishbein answered. "One hit from a six-inch gun and we're scrap iron anyway." He was right there, too. Destroyers weren't armored against shellfire. They couldn't be; they depended on speed instead. Armor added weight and would have slowed them down.

After that, the ensign asked fewer questions.

George did everything at the Lamson's guns: he jerked shells, loaded, handled the altitude and azimuth screws, and finally commanded the piece. If he served a gun once he was assigned to his own ship, he knew he would start as a shell jerker. That was low man on the totem pole. He didn't care. As long as that gun was shooting at the Confederates-or the British, or the French, or the Japanese-he didn't care at all.

Some of the men on the Lamson got dreadfully seasick. The waves did pick her up and toss her around a good deal. That fresh-faced ensign turned almost as green as the Atlantic. George took the destroyer's motion in stride. Whatever the ocean did to her, it wasn't a patch on a fishing boat riding out a storm. Once you'd been through that, nothing else on the ocean would faze you… unless you were the luckless sort who never did find his sea legs. In that case, the Navy-or at least a warship-was a ghastly mistake.

There were men who kissed the dirty, splintery planks of the wharf when the Lamson got back to port in Providence. Nobody laughed at them. Everyone had been through enough to feel There but for the grace of God go I. If the grace of God didn't decide who made a good sailor and who didn't, George couldn't imagine what would.

As usual, the land seemed to reel when he came ashore. He was used to a constantly shifting surface under his feet; one that stayed in place felt wrong. So did a horizon that failed to roll and pitch. He knew the abnormalities would subside in a little while, which made them no less strange while they were going on.

Routine returned, including close-order drill. George endured it, waiting for his next cruise. The Navy had more nonsense in it than he'd expected when he put on the uniform. Once he was at sea, though, most of it went away. And that was what really mattered.

These days, cops with submachine guns patrolled the bus stop where blacks in the Terry went off to Augusta's war plants. They made sure nobody could repeat the atrocity that had scarred the colored part of town. Scipio didn't care. He went a couple of blocks out of his way every day so he didn't have to walk past that bus stop.

He knew avoiding it might not save him. There weren't enough cops in Augusta to examine every automobile in the Terry, let alone every one in the whole town. And a bomb didn't have to hide inside an auto. A creative terrorist had plenty of other choices.

Fewer whites joked about his penguin suit as he walked to the Huntsman's Lodge. Fewer joked at all. Hard suspicion filled most of the glances he got. His passbook got checked two or three times in the trip up to the restaurant.

Bathsheba said the same thing happened to her when she went to clean houses. More and more, whites in Augusta didn't want Negroes coming out of the Terry at all unless they rode on those buses.

Scipio wondered what the whites thought they would do if they started excluding waiters and cleaners and barbers and others who served them and made their lives easier and more comfortable. Would they start waiting on one another? He couldn't believe it. In the Confederate States, that was nigger work. The whole point of being a white in the CSA was that you didn't have to do nigger work. All whites were equal, above all blacks. Why else had the Confederate States seceded, if not to preserve that principle?

He slipped into the Huntsman's Lodge with a sigh of relief. As long as his shift lasted, everything would probably be all right. He knew his role here. He knew what to expect from his boss and the cooks and the other waiters and the customers. They wouldn't be wondering if he aimed to blow the place to hell and gone. The most they'd worry about was whether the steak they'd ordered rare would come back medium-rare. They'd look down their noses at him, but in a familiar way.

"Hello, Xerxes," Jerry Dover said when he came in. "You know a colored fella about your age named Aurelius? He said you did."

"Yes, suh, I knows Aurelius," Scipio answered. "How come you knows he?"

"He's looking for work here. Place he was at's closing down."

"Do Jesus! John Oglethorpe's place closin' down?" Scipio said in altogether unfeigned dismay. "He give me my first job waitin' tables in dis town-alongside Aurelius-when I come here durin' de las' war. What fo' he closin' down?"

"Got somethin' wrong with his ticker-he's not strong enough to keep the place open any more," Dover answered. "Too damn bad-I know he's been here a long time. This Aurelius knows his stuff, then?"

"Oh, yes, suh," Scipio said at once. "I reckon you knows about Oglethorpe's. Ain't no fancy place-just a diner. But Aurelius, he always put out de right forks an' spoons, an' he put dey where dey goes. I walk in dere lookin' for work, he check me on dat first thing."

He wondered if he'd just talked too much. Jerry Dover might ask him where he'd learned such things, if not at Oglethorpe's. On the other hand, Dover already knew Anne Colleton claimed he'd worked for her. If the restaurant manager had an ounce of sense, he knew that claim was true, too. He'd protected Scipio, but for the restaurant's sake more than the Negro's. And now Anne was dead. Scipio still found that hard to believe.

All Dover did ask was, "You reckon he can do the job?" That didn't just mean keeping the customers happy and knowing which fork went where. It meant showing up on time every day no matter what. It meant not making yourself intolerable to the cooks. It meant a good many other things, too, but those were the big ones.

Scipio nodded without hesitation. "Yes, suh. He do it. Dat man don't give you no trouble, not fo' nothin'."

"All right, then. I expect I'll take him on. We both know that Marius fella isn't working out."

This time, Scipio's nod was reluctant. Marius meant well. Scipio was convinced of that. But he also knew which road good intentions paved. The young waiter would come in late, and without letting Dover know ahead of time he'd be late. He was clumsy, and the cooks ragged him because of it. Like any cooks, the ones here were merciless when they scented weakness. And Marius couldn't take ribbing, and he was no damn good at giving it back.

Jerry Dover clapped Scipio on the back. "Don't worry about it. You're not the one who's going to can his ass. I am." He laughed. "And he'll probably end up in a war plant two days after I do it. Getting fired might be the best thing that ever happens to him."

"Yes, suh," said Scipio, who didn't believe it for a minute. Working in a war plant was better than getting shipped off to a camp, but it wasn't a whole lot better. The hours were long, the work was hard, and the pay was lousy. Very few blacks complained where whites could hear them. By all appearances, nobody did that more than once.

Out to the dining room Scipio went. It hadn't started filling up yet. A couple of businessmen sat smoking Habanas and going on in low voices about the killings they were making. Blacks might not gain much from the war plants. More than a few whites did.

Off at a corner table, a Confederate captain was spending a week's pay to impress a pretty blond girl. Scipio wondered if he'd get as much return for his investment as the businessmen did for theirs. He must have thought so, or he wouldn't have brought her here.

Scipio smiled at the eagerness blazing from the young officer. Confederate soldiers bothered him much less than Freedom Party stalwarts or guards. Soldiers mostly looked outward, not inward. The Party oppressed Negroes. Soldiers aimed at the USA.

And yet… Scipio wished he hadn't thought about and yet. He'd killed a Confederate officer in 1916, as the Congaree Socialist Republic fell to pieces. Plenty of other officers and soldiers had helped to break it. He wished he could forget those days, but he didn't think he'd ever be free of them.

Before long, more people started coming into the Huntsman's Lodge. Scipio was glad enough to serve them, and wished there were more still. As long as he stayed busy, he didn't have to think. Not thinking, these days, counted for a blessing.

Bathsheba would have wagged a finger at him if he'd said something like that where she could hear it. Her faith sustained her. Part of Scipio wished he too believed in God and in good times to come. He wished he could. But what kind of God would let people go through what the Negroes in the CSA were enduring? No kind that Scipio wanted anything to do with.

When his shift ended, he made his way home. That was plenty to put the fear of God in him. Since the two auto bombs went off, black predators weren't all he had to worry about in the Terry. Whites with pistols or rifles or submachine guns often came in after night fell and shot up the place almost at random. They'd hit his building only once, and never the floor where he and his family lived. Who could say how long that would last, though?

Sometimes people in the Terry would shoot back. But that carried its own risks. The only thing that would guarantee a Negro a more horrible death than killing a white man was raping a white woman. No matter how desperate for self-defense the blacks of Augusta were, any serious resistance would bring more firepower than they could hope to withstand down on their heads.

Damned if we do, damned if we don't, Scipio thought miserably. Somebody not too far away chose that exact moment to fire off a whole magazine from a submachine gun. It punctuated his bitter thoughts. So did the laughter-without a doubt from a white throat-that followed.

"Praise the Lord you're here," Bathsheba said when Scipio finally walked into their apartment.

"Praise de Lawd," Scipio echoed, tasting his own hypocrisy. He added, "You should oughta be sleepin'."

"Guns woke me." By the calm way his wife said it, it might have been an everyday occurrence. Increasingly, it was. As Scipio got out of his tuxedo, Bathsheba asked, "What's the news?"

He had some this evening: "Look like Aurelius be comin' to work at de Huntsman's Lodge."

"How come?" Bathsheba asked. "Don't you tell me Mr. Oglethorpe threw him out. I don't believe it." John Oglethorpe was the most decent white man either of them knew. He would have clouted anybody who told him so in the side of the head with a frying pan. In an odd way, that too was a measure of his decency.

Scipio shook his head. "Mistuh Oglethorpe closin' down on account of he ain't well no more. Aurelius got to find what he kin."

"I pray for Mr. Oglethorpe," Bathsheba said. Scipio nodded. Prayer couldn't hurt. On the other hand, he didn't think it would do much good. Oglethorpe had to be pushing eighty, or maybe past it. When you got to that age, you didn't sit down and start War and Peace.

Sliding his nightshirt on over his head, Scipio brushed his teeth at the sink and then lay down beside Bathsheba. Had he been in a mood to thank God for anything, it would have been for good teeth. He still had all but two of the ones he'd been born with, and they didn't give him much trouble. He knew how lucky he was by the misery so many people went through.

Then again, he still had the skin he was born with, too. That caused him lots of misery all by itself. That kind of skin caused millions of people in the CSA misery. And who cared about them? Nobody in this country. Nobody in the United States, or they would have protested louder when the Confederates started abusing Negroes over and above the ways they'd always abused them. Nobody in the Empire of Mexico. Nobody in Britain or France, not when they were on the same side as Jake Featherston.

Nobody at all.

"Ain't easy, bein' a nigger," he muttered.

"What you say?" Bathsheba asked sleepily. He repeated himself, a little louder this time. She nodded; he could feel the bed move. "Never was, never is, never gonna be. You ain't used to that by now?"

Her words paralleled his thoughts all too well. But, for once, however bad it had been, however bad it might be, didn't measure up to how bad it was now. Scipio started to say so. But his wife's breathing had gone soft and regular; she'd fallen back to sleep.

Scipio wished he could do the same. No matter what he wished, he couldn't. He had too much on his mind. What if a white man sent a burst of submachine-gun fire through this flat in the next five minutes? What if a black man set off an auto bomb in front of the building? What if…?

What if you relax and get some rest? Scipio shook his head. Those other things might happen. They were only too likely to happen. Rest and sleep were unlikely to come any time soon. He didn't know what he could do about that. He didn't think he could do anything. And that by itself made a perfectly good reason not to be able to sleep.

Armstrong Grimes loped in the direction of Provo, Utah. Barrels rumbled along with the advancing U.S. infantry. Most of them couldn't go any faster than he could. The Army had hauled Great War machines out of storage and put them to work against the Mormons. Philadelphia needed its modern barrels for the fight against the CSA, and must have figured these antiques would do well enough here.

In a way, Armstrong could see the War Department's point of view. Against an enemy with no barrels of his own, any old barrels would do. But these beasts had enormous crews, broke down if you looked at them sideways, and couldn't get out of their own way. It did make him wonder how seriously the folks back East took this fighting.

A machine gun in a farmhouse up ahead started chattering. Armstrong dove behind a boulder and shot back. He didn't know how much good that would do. A lot of the houses here were built like fortresses. The Mormons defended them as if they were fortresses, too. Armstrong had already discovered that.

One of those slow, awkward barrels turned toward the farmhouse. Since it had a prow-mounted cannon instead of a rotating turret, it had to turn to make the gun bear on the target. It waddled forward. Bullets from the machine gun spanged off its armor. It could ignore those, though any cannon shell would have ripped into it like a can opener.

Confident in its immunity, the barrel moved in for the perfect shot-and ran over a buried mine. Whump! Armstrong didn't know how many tons the barrel weighed, but the mine made it jump in the air. Smoke and flames poured out of the cannon port and all the machine-gun ports. They poured from the escape hatches, too, when those flew open. Only a handful of crewmen managed to get out, and the Mormon machine gunners remorselessly shot most of them down.

Ammunition started cooking off inside the carcass of the machine. The pop-pop-pop sounded absurdly cheerful, like firecrackers on the Fourth of July. By then, whoever was still inside the barrel had to be dead.

"Son of a bitch," Armstrong muttered. A moment later, another barrel hit a mine and started to burn. "Son of a bitch!" he said. The Mormons had known what they'd be up against, all right, and they were ready to fight it. Did anybody know what we'd be up against? he wondered.

Whistling screams in the air made Armstrong dig in for dear life. The shells that came down on the U.S. soldiers weren't of the ordinary sort. The Mormons had some conventional artillery, but not a whole lot. As they had with their biplane bomber, they'd improvised. Large-caliber mortars didn't shoot very far, but you didn't want to be on the receiving end when the bombs landed.

The earth shook under Armstrong. He jammed his thumbs into his ears and yelled as loud as he could. That eased the blast, a little. Dirt and small stones-and a couple not so small-thrown up by near misses pattered down on his back.

Corporal Stowe jumped in the foxhole with him. The squad leader shouted something. Armstrong took his thumbs out of his ears. Stowe shouted it again: "Gas!"

"Shit," Armstrong said, and grabbed for his mask. If it was mustard gas or nerve gas, even the mask might not help. Those could get you through the skin-you didn't have to inhale them.

More mortar bombs thudded home. They were obviously homemade. What about the poison gas in them? Did the Mormons have labs cranking it out in the desert somewhere? That wasn't impossible; who paid attention to anything in Utah but the stretch from Provo up to Ogden? But it was also possible that the rebels here had had some help from others who called themselves Rebels. The Confederates would have to be crazy not to do all they could for the Mormons. As long as this uprising tied down large numbers of U.S. soldiers, those soldiers wouldn't go into action against the CSA.

Armstrong breathed in air that tasted of rubber. He peered out through little portholes that needed cleaning.

A U.S. barrel was shelling the house that held the machine gun. Part of the roof had fallen in, but the machine-gun crew was still in business. Muzzle flashes and the streaks of tracers made that very clear. Sooner or later, U.S. forces would drive the Mormons out of that house, but at what price? The USA had already lost two barrels and most of the big crews the lumbering Great War machines carried. And another old-fashioned barrel wasn't moving and wasn't shooting. Had gas got the men inside? Armstrong wouldn't have been surprised.

We aren't buying anything cheap today, he thought. Whatever the price, in the end the United States could afford to pay it and the Mormons couldn't. Just because the United States could, though, didn't necessarily mean they should. That seemed obvious to PFC Armstrong Grimes. He wondered if it had occurred to anybody in the War Department. On the evidence, it seemed unlikely.

U.S. artillery started pounding the machine-gun position. More U.S. shells fell farther back: counterbattery fire against the Mormon mortars. Of course, the mortar crews might not have hung around to get pounded. Mortars were much lighter and more portable than regular artillery. Again, did anybody on the U.S. side think in those terms?

Any which way, Armstrong knew what his job was. He jumped out of his foxhole, ran forward twenty or thirty feet, and threw himself into a crater one of the mortar bombs had made-they hadn't all been loaded with poison gas. The machine gun's stream of bullets came searching for him, but too late. He'd reached new cover.

Have to stay here a while, till they forget about me. He panted. Running hard in a gas mask wasn't easy. It was, in fact, damn near impossible. The filter cartridge wouldn't let you suck in enough air.

He could have all the air he wanted if he took off the mask. Of course, he would also keel over in short order if he got unlucky. Some men didn't care. They took big chances with poison gas, just because they couldn't stand their gas masks. Armstrong took his share of chances, too, but not like that.

When artillery failed to silence the Mormon machine gun, dive bombers paid it a call. They didn't scream like Confederate Asskickers, but they flattened the house. The machine gun fell silent at last. U.S. soldiers, Armstrong among them, cautiously moved forward.

No one shot at them from the shattered house any more. But as they drew near, somebody stepped on a cunningly buried land mine. The man in green-gray screamed, but not for long-he'd been blown to red rags below the waist. And another machine gun a couple of hundred yards father back, whose crew seemed to have waited for just that, opened up on the Americans.

Armstrong didn't know whether to shit or go blind. He threw himself to the ground, wondering if explosives hidden beneath it would blast him sky-high an instant later. Bullets stitched malevolently through the dirt all around him, kicking dust off the portholes of his gas mask. He crawled for the shelter of a rock. It wasn't much shelter, because it wasn't much of a rock. He gratefully took anything he could get.

Behind him, an American machine gun opened up. Bullets zipped over his head-not far enough over it, as far as he was concerned. They'd probably nail some of his buddies, not that the gunners would give a damn. He didn't shed a tear when machine gunners got shot. They were almost as bad as snipers.

And they couldn't knock out the Mormon machine gunners, which made them all the more worthless. He had no idea where or if the Mormons had done their basic training. Wherever it was, they all fought like ten-year veterans. They never showed much of themselves, they always had gun positions supporting other gun positions, and they didn't seem to have heard of retreat. The only way U.S. soldiers moved forward was over their dead bodies.

Armstrong spotted Corporal Stowe sprawled behind another rock. He pointed toward the Mormons ahead-making sure he exposed no part of himself to their fire-and shouted, "Why can't we turn these fuckers loose against the Confederates? They'd kick Featherston's ass." Through the mask, he sounded disembodied, unearthly.

"Tell me about it," Stowe yelled back. "Only trouble is, they'd rather shoot us."

"Yeah. I know." Armstrong started digging in behind his rock. The corporal was only too right.

As usual, U.S. artillery went into action to try to neutralize the latest Mormon machine-gun nest. Neutralize was a nice, meaningless word. If you neutralized somebody, you just took him off the board like a captured checker. You didn't blow his arm off halfway between the elbow and shoulder or drive red-hot metal shards through his balls or take off the top of his skull like the shell from a hard-boiled egg. Of course, he was trying to do all those charming things to you, too. You couldn't afford to waste a lot of grief on him. Not wasting grief on him was what brought words like neutralize front and center.

The machine gun stopped shooting. Armstrong stayed right where he was. He'd seen soldiers play possum before. If you thought they were really down for the count, you'd pay for it. Armstrong's goal in life was to make the other guy pay for it. So far, he'd managed.

He glanced over to Corporal Stowe. The two-striper wasn't going anywhere, either. Armstrong just hoped some whistle-ass lieutenant wouldn't order everybody forward. That would show whether the Mormons were fooling, all right-probably show it the hard way.

Before a junior officer could do anything stupid, some dumb kid did it for him, standing up so he could move toward the objective. Somewhere up the road was a town romantically called Thistle. That was about as good as naming a place Dandelion or Poison Ivy.

As the kid walked forward and a couple of other soldiers stood up to go with him, Armstrong hoped the artillery had got lucky. It could happen; a direct hit from a 105 would make even a sandbagged machine-gun nest say uncle.

Armstrong still sat tight. He wanted to see what was happening before he put his neck on the line. He didn't always get the chance, but he wanted to. Then more trusting soldiers trotted forward. They carried their Springfields at the ready. Fat lot of good it'll do them, Armstrong thought.

Fat lot of good it did them. The machine gun, very much unsubdued, opened up again. Several advancing soldiers fell. Others dove for cover. Fools. Suckers, went through Armstrong's mind. He was no great brain, but he could figure out when somebody was lying in wait for him. Maybe some of the men who'd managed to take cover would learn that lesson now. The sorry bastards who'd stopped bullets wouldn't get the chance.

Eventually, a barrel shelled the machine gun into silence. Armstrong scurried forward. Would Thistle be worth having once the Army finally took it? Not likely. And what would happen after that? They'd push on to Provo, where the Mormons would fight from house to house, and which was big enough to have a lot of houses. How many men would go through the grinder there? How many would come out the other side? And the most important question of all: will I be one of them?

Alec Pomeroy wrinkled his nose when he walked into the barn on his grandmother's farm. "It smells like animal poop in here!" he said.

"Well… yes." His mother fought not to laugh. To Mary Pomeroy, the smell of a barn was one of the most normal, natural things in the world. She'd grown up with it. Even now, she took it altogether for granted. But Alec was town-raised. Farm life and farm smells didn't come natural to him. Mary said, "Don't you like it?"

"No! Eww! It's nasty! It's disgustering!" Alec hadn't quite learned how to say that, but he knew what he meant.

"Well, why don't you go back to Grandma at the farmhouse, then?" Mary said. "If you ask her nicely, maybe-just maybe-she'll let you have another piece of rhubarb pie."

"Do you think so?" Alec's eyes got big.

"You'll never know till you try, will you?" Mary said. Alec was off like a shot.

Mary breathed a sigh of relief. She'd hoped the odor of the barn would be enough to get her son out of her hair for a little while. She didn't need long. The old wagon wheel still lay in the same old place. Moving it took an effort, but not an enormous one. She scraped away the dirt under it, and then lifted up the flat board the dirt concealed.

Under the board was a hole her father had dug. Mary nodded to herself. She'd taken years to find that hole. No one else ever had. It had kept Arthur McGregor's bomb-making tools safe, even though the Yanks had searched the farm at least a dozen times.

And now it would keep them safe again. Mary was carrying the biggest handbag she owned, one the size of a young suitcase. It was plenty big enough to hold the dynamite and blasting caps and fuse and crimpers and other specialized tools of the bomber's trade.

She took them out of the purse and put them back in the hole from which she'd exhumed them years before. You're not going in there forever, she thought, only for a while. Who could say whether Wilf Rokeby would tell the occupiers what he knew about her? If he decided she was the one who'd planted that flyer in the post office, he would. She wanted the evidence out of the way, just in case.

With the explosives and tools stowed once more, she replaced the board and pushed dirt and straw over it till it looked like the rest of the barn's floor. Then the old wagon wheel went back where it belonged. She scuffed around the dirt where it had lain after she'd moved it, so that place looked ordinary, too.

Then she had to clean her hands as best she could on her skirt. Fortunately, it was beige, so the dust hardly showed. She looked around one more time. Satisfied she'd set everything to rights, she went back to the farmhouse herself.

As she always did, she felt as if she were falling back into her childhood when she went inside. But how had her mother got old? Maude McGregor's hair was supposed to be as red as her own, not this dull, lifeless gray. And when had her back begun to bend?

Alec was devastating an enormous chunk of rhubarb pie. Mary's mother looked up with a smile on her face. It slipped a little when her eyes met Mary's. "Did you take care of whatever needed taking care of?" she asked.

Maude McGregor had never said much of anything about what Arthur McGregor had done. She'd known. Mary was sure of that. Her mother couldn't have failed to know. But she'd got into the habit of keeping quiet, and she'd stuck with it. She'd never said much of anything about what Mary was up to, either. Plainly, though, she also knew about that-or knew enough, anyhow.

Mary nodded now. "Everything's fine, Ma. Everything's just fine."

"Good," her mother said. "Always nice to have you visit, dear. Don't want to see any trouble. Don't want to see any trouble at all. We've had enough, haven't we? Come back whenever you need to."

"Can I have some more pie?" Alec asked.

"If you eat any more pie, you'll turn into a rhubarb," Mary said. That was the wrong approach; Alec liked the idea. He would have liked it even better if he'd had any idea what a rhubarb looked like.

He'd eaten enough rhubarb pie and other things to fall asleep on the trip home. He hardly ever did that any more, however much Mary wished he would. He'd be grumpy when he woke up, grumpy and then bouncy. Mary knew he wouldn't want to go to bed tonight. She'd worry about that later. You sure will, she told herself.

On the way back into town, the Oldsmobile bumped over the railroad tracks. Alec stirred and muttered, but didn't rouse. Mary smiled to herself. One of these days before too long… but not quite yet.

"I hope you told your mother hello for me," Mort said when he got home that night.

"Of course I did," Mary said.

"That's good." His smile was wide and genial, as usual. "I'm glad. You haven't been out there for a while. Is she still all right by herself?"

With a parent getting older, that was always a worry, and Mary had noticed how the years were starting to lie heavy on her mother's shoulders. Even so, she nodded. "For a while longer, I think. She hangs on. That farm is her life-that and her grandchildren." For some reason, Alec wasn't much interested in supper. Mary didn't scold him, not after what she knew he'd put away.

Three days later, someone knocked on the door in the middle of the afternoon. When Mary opened it, she found herself facing a tall, skinny, swarthy officer in a blue-gray uniform. "Mrs. Pomeroy?" he asked in accented English. "I am Captain Brassens of the Army of the Republic of Quebec." He touched one corner of the skinny black mustache that made him look like a cinema villain. Behind him stood four or five soldiers, Frenchies all.

"Yes?" Mary said. "And so? What do you want with me? I haven't done anything."

"It could be," Captain Brassens said. "Or it could be otherwise. We shall see. Do you know a certain Mrs. Laura Moss, formerly Laura Secord, of Berlin, Ontario?"

"Never heard of her," Mary said at once. Wilf Rokeby was throwing mud, then. She might have known. She had known.

Brassens's raised eyebrow was Gallic almost to the point of self-parody. "You deny, then, that you posted to the said Mrs. Moss a package shortly before a bomb burst in her flat, killing her and her young daughter?"

"Of course I deny it," Mary said. "I've never heard anything so ridiculous in all my born days."

"This may be true. Or, on the other hand, this may be something other than true." Captain Brassens turned to the men at his back and spoke to them in French. Mary knew next to nothing of what had been Canada's other language. The soldiers showed her what their commander had said, though. They turned her apartment upside down.

"I don't suppose you have a warrant," she said as they got to work.

The Quebecois officer shook his head. "I have none. I need none. Military occupation takes precedence. You should know this." He looked at her reproachfully, as if to say he might have to give her a low mark because of her ignorance. But she knew. She'd just wanted to get her protest on the record.

And she had one more protest to add: "I think it's a crying shame you can do this to an innocent person who's never done anybody any harm."

"So you say," Captain Brassens answered coldly. "But is it not true that your brother was shot for sabotage? Is it not true that your father was a notorious bomber who killed many? It could be that you are an innocent person. It could be, yes. But it also could be that you are not. We shall see."

Wilf Rokeby must have been singing like a meadowlark in spring. He has a yellow belly like a meadowlark, too, Mary thought. "You can't blame me for what my family did-and my brother never did anything," she told Brassens. "Go ahead and look as much as you please. I've got nothing to hide." That's the truth. I already hid it.

The soldiers were gentle with Alec. They didn't let him interfere, but they didn't smack him or even shout at him. He seemed to decide they were making a mess for the fun of it. To a little boy, that was a perfectly reasonable conclusion. He started throwing things around, too. The Frenchies thought that was funny.

After they'd done their worst, they reported back to Captain Brassens. They spoke French, so Mary didn't know what they said. He asked them several sharp questions in the same language. After they'd answered, he turned to her and said, "Eh bien, it appears-it appears, mind you-that you have been telling the truth and someone else is the liar. We shall remember that."

"I hope you do," Mary said-raw relief helped her sound angry, the way she was supposed to. She drew herself up and glared at Captain Brassens. "And I hope you'll have the common decency to apologize for being wrong."

He stared steadily back at her. "I am sorry…" he began, and she could tell he meant, I am sorry we did not catch you. But then, after a pause, he finished, "… we have disturbed your tranquility. Good day." He started to turn away.

"Wait," Mary said. The Quebecois officer stopped in surprise. "There's some of our stuff stored in the basement, too," she told him. "If you're going to do this to me, you might as well do everything at once."

"Oh. I see. You need not worry yourself about that, Mrs. Pomeroy," the Frenchy said. "We searched those things before paying a call upon you. Had we found anything of interest there, we would have paid a different sort of call. On that, you may rely." He spoke to his men in their own language. They tramped away.

"Look what they did, Mommy!" Alec said. "Are they going to come back and do it some more?"

"I hope not," Mary answered. "Will you help me try to put things back together?"

He did try. She gave him credit for that. But he was much more interested in making messes than in repairing them. He got bored in a hurry. Mary hadn't realized how much she and Mort had till she saw it all spilled on the floor. The soldiers in blue-gray had enjoyed mess-making as much as Alec did. They'd even pawed through her underwear, though explosives were unlikely to be lurking there.

She'd got things about half repaired by the time Mort came home from across the street. "What happened here?" he asked. "Our own private earthquake?"

"You're close," Mary answered. "The Frenchies searched the place."

Her husband blinked. "Why would they do that?"

"Because my father… did what he did. Because my brother… was who he was," she said. Because Wilf Rokeby is trying to save his own skin, she added, but only to herself. She wasn't supposed to know anything more than the usual gossip about how and why the longtime postmaster had ended up in trouble with the occupying authorities.

Mort gave her a hug. "Those dirty bastards," he said, which was about as rough as he ever talked around her. "They've got no business doing that. None, you hear me?"

"They've got the guns," Mary said bleakly. "They can do whatever they want."

She hated that kind of argument when Mort used it on her. By his sour expression, he didn't like it coming back at him, either. He said, "It's not right. They can't tear your place to shreds for no reason at all." It wasn't for no reason at all, but he didn't know that. Mary didn't intend to let him find out, either.

Big, snorting trucks brought the latest shipment of Negroes to Camp Dependable. The trucks were painted butternut and had butternut canvas covers over the back. From the outside, they looked just like the vehicles that hauled Confederate soldiers here and there. And, in fact, the differences were minor. The biggest one was that these trucks were fitted with manacles and leg irons to make sure their passengers didn't depart before they got where they were going.

Jefferson Pinkard came out to watch the unloading, the way he always did. His men had it down to a science. He watched anyway. The Negroes coming into his camp had nothing to lose, and they probably knew it. If some of them could beat the restraints before they got here, they might grab a guard who was releasing them and turn his gun on the others. Even science could go wrong, especially if you got careless.

Nobody here got careless. That was another reason Jeff came to the unloadings. When men worked under the boss's eye, they worked by the book. They didn't get smart. They didn't get cute. They just did what they were supposed to do. Nothing went wrong, which was exactly what Jeff wanted.

"Good job," he told Mercer Scott when the last Negro had been processed through into the camp.

"Yeah." The guard chief nodded. He paused to light a cigarette, then held out the pack. Jeff took one, too. Scott went on, "All the same, though, I wonder why the hell we bother."

"How do you mean?" Jeff asked.

Scott's gesture left a small trail of smoke in its wake. "Well, shit, we could get rid of these niggers as soon as they come in the gates, blow their goddamn brains out while they're still in the trucks, and save ourselves the bother of leadin' 'em out to the swamp later on."

"Population reductions," Pinkard said distastefully. They still offended his sense of order. He was a jailer, dammit, not a… a… He didn't have the word for what his superiors were turning him into, didn't have it and didn't want to go looking for it very hard. After a moment, he shook his head. "Wouldn't work so good. They'd have to shoot 'em, and then they'd have to get rid of their bodies, 'stead o' just letting 'em fall into the trenches like they do now. We'd have more people eating their guns and going out like Chick Blades."

"Shit," Scott said again, but he didn't try to tell Jeff he was wrong. Instead, he suggested, "We could let the niggers who're still alive dispose of the others."

That sounded halfhearted. There were good reasons why it should, too. Pinkard pointed that out: "This place is antsy enough as is. We start doin' our population reductions right here and let the niggers know for sure we're doin' 'em, it's gonna blow up right in our faces. You want to tell me any different?"

"No." Mercer Scott scowled, but he could see the obvious when you rubbed his nose in it. "No, goddammit."

"All right, then," Jeff said. "We'll keep on doin' it the same old way till we come up with somethin' better. Better, you hear me?"

"I hear you." Scott threw his butt on the ground and crushed it out under his boot heel. He probably would have sooner crushed Jeff under it, but even a guard chief didn't always get his druthers.

For that matter, a camp commandant didn't, either. Jeff went back to his office muttering to himself. He hated the way Camp Dependable worked now, but he hadn't been able to come up with anything better, either. Trucks came in. Shackled prisoners shambled into the swamp. They didn't come out. And, every so often, a Chick Blades would run a hose from his auto's exhaust pipe into the passenger compartment, turn on the motor, and…

The obvious. And maybe, maybe, the not so obvious. Instead of sitting down at his desk, Pinkard started pacing around it. After half a dozen revolutions, he paused, an unaccustomed look of wonder spreading across his fleshy face. "Well, fuck me!" he exclaimed. "Maybe I am a genius."

If he was, he needed something to prove his genius on. He hurried out of the office again. To his relief, not all the trucks had left. He kept one of them and sent the driver back with a pal. When the man squawked, Pinkard said, "You tell your boss to give me a call. I'll square it with him-you bet I will." The driver grumbled some more, but Jeff had the bulge to get away with it.

"What's going on?" Mercer Scott asked, attracted by the argument.

"Need me a truck," Jeff answered.

Scott scratched his head. "How come?"

"You'll see," was all Pinkard said. If this worked, it was his baby. If it didn't work, he'd have to fix it up with the fellow from whose bailiwick he'd lifted the truck. He figured he could. One truck and one miffed driver were small change in the bureaucratic skirmishes that ate so much of his life these days. He clapped Scott on the back. "I'm going into town for a little while. Try not to let the niggers steal this place or burn it down while I'm gone, all right?"

Scott staring after him, he drove the truck into Alexandria. He was glad traffic was light. He'd never tried handling anything so big, and he wasn't used to a gearshift with five forward speeds instead of the usual three. But he didn't hit anything, and he wasn't grinding the gears when he shifted nearly so much by the time he got where he was going: a garage named Halliday's, on the outskirts of town.

Stuart Halliday was a compact man with battered, clever hands. "What can I do for you, buddy?" he asked when Jeff descended from the truck.

Jeff told him what he wanted, finishing, "Can you handle it?"

The mechanic rubbed his chin. "Sheet metal all the way around there… Gasketing on the doors…"

"Gotta be sturdy sheet metal," Pinkard said.

"Yeah, I heard you." Halliday thought for a little while, then nodded. "Yeah, I can do it. Set you back two hundred and fifty bucks."

"I'll give you one seventy-five," Jeff said. They haggled good-naturedly for a little while before settling on two and a quarter. Jeff asked, "How soon can you let me have it?"

"Be about a week." Halliday sent Pinkard a curious look. "What the hell you want it like that for?"

"Camp business," Jeff answered. If the snoopy garage man couldn't work it out for himself, that was all to the good. Then Pinkard coughed. In all of this, he hadn't figured in one thing. "Uh-you give me a lift back to camp?"

Halliday carefully didn't smile. "Why, sure."

When Jeff came back without the truck, Mercer Scott sent him a stare full of hard suspicion. He didn't care. He knew what he was doing, or thought he did. Over the week, while Halliday was overhauling the truck, he made a few preparations of his own. Till he saw how this would go, he intended to play his cards close to his chest.

He paid Halliday when the mechanic delivered the revised and edited machine. He used camp money. If the thing didn't work, he'd pay it back out of his own pocket. Halliday stuffed brown banknotes into his coveralls. "I left that one hole, like you said," he told Jeff. "I don't understand it, not when the rest is pretty much airtight, but I did it."

"You got paid for doin' the work," Jeff answered. "You didn't get paid for understanding."

One of Halliday's kids drove him away from Camp Dependable. Unlike Jeff, he'd thought ahead. After he was gone, Jeff did some of his own work on the truck. He drew a small crowd of guards. Most of them hung around for a while, then went off shrugging and shaking their heads.

Mercer Scott watched like a hawk. Suddenly, he exclaimed, "You son of a bitch! You son of a bitch! You reckon it'll work?"

Pinkard looked up from fitting a length of pipe to the hole that had puzzled Stuart Halliday. "I don't know," he said, "but I aim to find out."

"Chick Blades ought to get a promotion for giving you the idea," Scott said. "Goddamn shame he's too dead to appreciate it."

"Yeah." Jeff examined his handiwork. Slowly, he nodded to himself. "That ought to do it. Now I'll just announce a transfer to another camp…"

Getting Negroes to volunteer to hop into the truck was so easy, it almost embarrassed him. The hardest part was picking and choosing among them. They knew that when they got shackled together and marched out into the swamp, they weren't coming back. But a transfer to another camp had to be an improvement. Maybe there wouldn't be population reductions somewhere else.

Pinkard drove the truck himself that first time. It was his baby. He wanted to see how it went. He closed the gasketed doors behind the Negroes who'd got in. The lock and bar to keep those doors closed were good and solid. Halliday hadn't skimped. Jeff would have skinned the mechanic alive if he had.

He started up the engine and drove out of camp. It wasn't long before the Negroes realized exhaust fumes were filling their compartment. They started shouting-screaming-and pounding on the metal walls. Jeff drove and drove. After a while, the screams subsided and the pounding stopped. He drove a little longer after that, just to be on the safe side.

When he was satisfied things had worked out the way he'd hoped, he took a road that the prisoners had built into the swamp. Mercer Scott and half a dozen guards waited at the end of it. Jeff got out of the cab and walked around to the back of the truck. "Well, let's see what we've got," he said, and opened the rear doors.

"By God, you did it," Scott said.

The Negroes inside were dead, asphyxiated. All the guards had to do was take them out and throw them in a hole in the ground. Well, almost all. One of the men held his nose and said, "Have to hose it down in there before you use it again."

"Reckon you're right," Jeff said. But he was just about happy enough to dance a jig. No fuss, no muss-well, not too much-no bother. Guards wouldn't have to pull the trigger again and again and again. They wouldn't have to see what they were doing at all. They'd just have to… drive.

And, best of all, the Negroes inside Camp Dependable wouldn't know what was happening. Their pals who got in the truck were going to another camp, weren't they? Sure they were. Nobody expected them to come back.

Mercer Scott came up and set a hand on Pinkard's shoulder. "You know how jealous I am of you? You got any idea? Christ, I'd've given my left nut to come up with something so fine."

"It really did work, didn't it?" Jeff said. "You know what? I reckon maybe I will try and bump poor Chick up a grade or two. It'd make his missus' pension a little bigger."

Scott gave him a sly look. "She'd be right grateful for that. Not a bad-lookin' woman, not a bit. Maybe I oughta be jealous of you twice."

Jeff hadn't thought of it like that. Now that he did, he found himself nodding. She'd been haggard and in shock at the funeral, but still… Business first, though. "Other thing I'm gonna do," he said, "is I'm gonna call Richmond, let 'em know about this. They been tellin' me stuff all along. By God, it's my turn now."

Ferdinand Koenig strode into Jake Featherston's office in the Gray House. The Attorney General was a big, bald, burly man with a surprisingly light, high voice. "Good to see you, Ferd. Always good to see you," Jake said, and stuck out his hand. Koenig squeezed it. They went back to the very beginnings of the Freedom Party. Koenig had backed Jake at the crucial meeting that turned it into his party. He came as close to being a friend as any man breathing; Jake had meant every word of his greeting. Now he asked, "What's on your mind?"

"Head of one of the camps out in Louisiana, fellow named Pinkard, had himself a hell of a good idea," Koenig said.

"I know about Pinkard-reliable man," Jake said. "Joined the Party early, stayed in when we were in trouble. Wife ran around on him, poor bastard. Went down to fight in Mexico, and not many who weren't in the hard core did that."

Koenig chuckled. "I could've named a lot of people in slots like that-slots lower down, too-and you'd know about them the same way."

"Damn right I would. I make it my business to know stuff like that," Featherston said. The more you knew about somebody, the better you could guess what he'd do next-and the easier you could get your hooks into him, if you ever had to do that. "So what's Pinkard's idea?"

"He's… got a whole new way of looking at the population-reduction problem," Koenig said.

Jake almost laughed out loud at that. Even a tough customer like Ferd Koenig had trouble calling a spade a spade. Jake knew what he aimed to do. Koenig wanted to do the same thing. The only difference was, Ferd didn't like talking about it. He-and a bunch of other people-were like a hen party full of maiden ladies tiptoeing around the facts of life.

The laugh came out as an indulgent smile. "Tell me about it," Jake urged. Koenig did. Featherston listened intently. The longer the Attorney General talked, the harder Jake listened. He leaned forward till his chair creaked, as if to grab Koenig's words as fast as they came out. When the other man finished, Jake whistled softly. "This could be big, Ferd. This could be really, really big."

"I was thinking the same thing," Koenig said.

"A fleet of trucks like that, they'd be easy to build-cheap, too," Featherston said. "How much you tell me it cost Pinkard to fix that one up?"

Koenig had to check some notes he pulled from a breast pocket. "He paid… let me see… $225 for the sheet-metal paneling, plus another ten bucks for the pipe. He did the work with that himself-didn't want the mechanic figuring out what was going on."

"He is a smart fellow," Featherston said approvingly. "We get a fleet of those bastards made, we're out of the retail business and we go into wholesale." Now he did laugh-he was wondering what Saul Goldman would say to that. But he got back to business in a hurry. "Shooting people in the head all day-that's hard work. A lot of men can't take it."

"That's what Pinkard said. He said this guard named"-Koenig glanced at the notes again-"named Blades killed himself with car exhaust, and that's what gave him the idea. He asked if Blades' widow could get a bigger pension on account of this turned out to be so important."

"Give it to her," Jake said at once. "Pinkard's right. Like I say, shooting people's hard work. It wears on you. It'd be harder still if you were shootin' gals and pickaninnies. But, hell, you load 'em in a truck, drive around for a while, and the job's taken care of-anybody can do that, anybody at all. Get a 'dozer to dig a trench, dump the bodies in, and get on back for the next load."

"You've got it all figured out." Koenig laughed, but more than a little nervously.

"Bet your ass I do," Featherston said. "This is part of what we've been looking for. We've always known what we were going to do, but we haven't found the right way to go about it. This here may not be the final solution, but we're sure as hell gettin' closer. You get to work on it right away. Top priority, you hear me?"

"How many trucks you reckon we'll need?" Koenig asked.

"Beats me," Jake said. "Find some bright young fella with one o' them slide rules to cipher it out for you. However many it is, you get 'em. I don't give a damn what you got to do-you get 'em."

"If it's too many, the Army may grumble," Koenig warned.

"Listen, Ferd, you leave the Army to me," Featherston said, his voice suddenly hard. "I said top priority, and I meant it. You get those trucks."

He hardly ever spoke to Ferd Koenig as superior to inferior. When he did, it hit hard. "Right, boss," the Attorney General mumbled. Jake nodded to himself. When he gave an order, that was what people were supposed to say.

After some hasty good-byes, Koenig all but fled his office. Featherston wondered if he'd hit too hard. He didn't want to turn the last of his old comrades into an enemy. Have to pat him on the fanny, make sure his feelings aren't hurt too bad, he thought. He cared about only a handful of people enough for their feelings to matter to him. Ferd Koenig probably topped the list.

Lulu stepped in. "The Vice President is here to see you, sir."

"Thank you, dear," Featherston said. His secretary smiled and ducked back out. She was also one of the people whose feelings he cared about.

Don Partridge, on the other hand… The Vice President of the CSA was an amiable nonentity from Tennessee. He had a big, wide smile, boyishly handsome good looks, and not a hell of a lot upstairs. That suited Jake just fine. Willy Knight had been altogether too much like him, and he'd barely survived the assassination attempt Knight put together. Well, the son of a bitch was dead now, and he'd had a few years in hell before he died, too. I pay everybody back, Jake thought. The United States were finding out about that. So were the Negroes in the Confederate States, and they'd find out more soon. Have to do something nice for that Pinkard fellow…

Jake worried about no coups from Don Partridge. Not having to worry about him was why he was Vice President. "Well, Don, what's on your mind?" he asked. Not a hell of a lot, he guessed.

"Got a joke for you," Partridge said. He went ahead and told it. Like a lot of his jokes, it revolved around a dumb farm girl. This time, she wanted to make a little record to send to her boyfriend at the front, but she didn't have the money to pay the man at the studio in town. "… and he said,, 'Get down on your knees and take it out of my pants." So she did., 'Take hold of it,' he said, and she did. And then he said,, 'Well, go ahead." And she said,, 'Hello, Freddie…" "

Partridge threw back his head and guffawed. Jake laughed, too. Unlike a lot of the jokes Don Partridge told, that one was actually funny. "Pretty good," Jake said. "What else is going on?"

"That's what I wanted to ask you, Mr. President," Partridge said. He knew better than to get too familiar with Jake. "You've got me out making speeches about how well everything's going, and sometimes folks ask when the war's going to be over. I'd like to know what to tell 'em."

He was earnest. He didn't want to do the wrong thing. He also had to know Featherston would come down on him like a thousand-pound bomb if he did. Jake didn't mind being feared, not even a little bit. He said, "You tell 'em it's Al Smith's fault we're still fighting. I offered a reasonable peace. I offered a just peace. He wouldn't have it. So we'll just have to keep knocking him over the head till he sees sense."

"Yes, sir. I understand that." Don Partridge nodded eagerly. "Knocking the damnyankees over the head is important. I know it is." He stuck out his chin and tried to look resolute. With his big, cowlike eyes, it didn't come off too well. "But the trouble is, sometimes the Yankees hit back, and people don't much like that."

"I don't like it, either," Jake said, which was a good-sized understatement even for him. "We're doing everything we can. As long as we hang in there, we'll lick 'em in the end. That's what you've got to let the people know."

The Vice President nodded. "I'll do it, sir! You can count on me."

"I do, Don." I count on you to stay out of my hair and not cause me any trouble. There are plenty of things you're not too good at, but you can manage that.

"I'm so glad, sir." Partridge gave Jake one of his famous smiles. From what some of the Freedom Party guards said, those smiles got him lady friends-or more than friends-from one end of the CSA to the other. This one, aimed at a man older than he was, had a smaller impact.

"Anything else I can do for you?" Featherston didn't quite tell Partridge to get the hell out of there, but he didn't miss by much. The Vice President took the hint and left, which he wouldn't have if Jake had made it more subtle.

He's a damn fool, Featherston thought, but even damn fools have their uses. That's something I didn't understand when I was younger. One thing he understood now was that he couldn't afford to let the damnyankees kill him before he'd won the war. He tried to imagine Don Partridge as President of the Confederate States. When he did, he imagined victory flying out the window. Damn fools had their uses, but running things wasn't one of them.

Featherston looked at a clock on the wall, then at a map across from it. He'd got Partridge out early; his next appointment wasn't for another twenty minutes. It was with Nathan Bedford Forrest III. The general was no fool. Railing against the Whigs, Jake had cussed them for being the party of Juniors and IIIs and IVs, people who thought they ought to have a place on account of what their last name was. Say what you would about Forrest, but he wasn't like that.

He came bounding into the President's office. He didn't waste time with hellos. Instead, he pointed to the map. "Sir, we're going to have a problem, and we're going to have it pretty damn quick."

"The one we've seen coming for a while now?" Jake asked.

Nathan Bedford Forrest III nodded. "Yes, sir." His face was wider and fleshier than that of his famous ancestor, but you could spot the resemblance in his eyes and eyebrows… and the first Nathan Bedford Forrest had had some of the deadliest eyes anybody'd ever seen. His great-grandson (the name had skipped a generation) continued, "The damnyankees have seen what we did in Ohio. Looks like they're getting ready to try the same thing here. After all, it's not nearly as far from the border to Richmond as it is from the Ohio River up to Lake Erie."

"Like you say, we've been looking for it," Featherston replied. "We've been getting ready for it, too. How much blood do they want to spend to get where they aim to go? We'll give 'em a Great War fight, only more so. And by God, even if they do take Richmond, they haven't hurt us half as bad as what we did to them farther west."

"I aim to try to keep that from happening," Forrest said. "I think I can. I hope I can. And you're right about the other. What we've done to them will make it harder for them to do things to us. But we're going to have a hell of a fight on our hands, Mr. President. You need to know that. Life doesn't come with a guarantee."

"I haven't backed down from a fight yet," Jake said. "I don't aim to start now."