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XV

From Los Angeles, the war back East seemed a quarrel in another room. Chester Martin followed it as closely as anyone, but that wasn't so closely as he would have liked. The wireless and the newspapers gave him the broad outlines of the stories, but only the broad outlines. He always wanted to learn more. Not being able to ate at him.

Even the Mormon uprising in Utah was hundreds of miles away. Martin kept trying to figure out how many U.S. divisions it was tying down. Try as he would, he couldn't. The papers and the wireless were coy as could be about stuff like that. He muttered and fumed. Those were divisions that should have been in action against the CSA. They should have, but they weren't.

When he muttered and fumed once too often in front of Rita, she said, "Why don't you stop flabbling about it? They aren't going to come out and tell you. If you can't figure it out from what you hear and what you read, maybe the Confederates won't be able to, either."

"Oh." Chester felt foolish. He wanted to say several things. They were things he wasn't supposed to say in front of his wife, so he didn't. What he did say was, "Well, sweetheart, when you're right, you're right." Anyone who'd been married for a while learned to use that phrase pretty often.

Rita just nodded, as if she knew she'd got her due. "The only way they'd pay as much attention to the war as you want would be if it came here."

Chester snorted. "Fat chance."

"You're right. Fat chance," Rita agreed. "And you know what else? I'm not sorry, not even a little bit. We've paid everything we owe anybody." She'd lost her first husband in the Great War. Chester had scars on his arm that would never go away and a Purple Heart stashed in a nightstand drawer. Rita repeated, "Everything." She knew he still thought about putting on the uniform again. She did everything she could to keep him from going out and signing up.

Four days later, on a cool, gray morning as close to autumnal as L.A. got (not very close, not as far as Chester was concerned, not when the leaves were mostly still on the trees and mostly still green), the Times and the wireless went nuts. A submersible-Confederate? Mexican? Japanese? nobody knew for sure-had surfaced off the coast near Santa Barbara, northwest of Los Angeles. Its deck gun fired maybe a dozen rounds at a seaside oil field. Then it slipped below the surface and disappeared. It was long gone before flying boats and destroyers got to the neighborhood.

At a construction site on the west side of town, Chester observed the hysteria with more than a little amusement. "You've almost got to hand it to the Confederates or whoever the hell it was," he said. "Sneaking up the coast took balls."

"We got ours draped over a doorknob, that's for damn sure," another builder said.

"You wait. You watch. Now we're going to have air-raid alerts and blackouts and all the other crap we've done without since just after the war started," Chester predicted. "Talk about a pain in the ass…"

But the other man said, "Maybe we need 'em. If the Confederates put bombers in Sonora, they could get here. Look at a map if you don't believe me."

Martin thought about it. Slowly, he nodded. "Maybe you're right, Frank. I guess they could. Whether it'd be worth their while is a different story, but they could."

Perhaps the powers that be were looking at the same map. By that afternoon, fighters started buzzing above Los Angeles, something else that hadn't happened since the war was new. They would dash across the sky like bad-tempered little dogs looking for rats to tear to pieces. No rats seemed to be in evidence. That relieved Chester, but only so much. Bombers on both sides that came overhead in daylight got shot down in large numbers. Night was the time when they could fly in something resembling safety.

He rode the trolley home with more than a little apprehension. What would the night be like? When he got off in Boyle Heights, newsboys on all the corners were still shouting about the submarine and what it had done. As a matter of fact, it hadn't done much. What it had done wouldn't change the way the war turned out by even the thickness of a hair.

But Rita greeted Chester at the door with, "Wasn't that horrible? Right off our coast, bold as brass! What's the world coming to?"

"I don't know, babe," he answered. "Somebody was asleep at the switch, is what it looks like to me."

That sort of thing was not what the authorities wanted people to be thinking. The wireless crackled with bulletins and commands all through the evening. Coast-watching battalions would be set up all the way from the border with Baja California to San Francisco. Airship patrols would be doubled and redoubled. And, as Chester had gloomily foretold, the blackout returned.

"We want to make sure the cunning enemy has no opportunity to strike us unawares," brayed the man who made that announcement.

Chester laughed out loud. "What do they think just happened?" he asked.

"Oh, hush," Rita said. "This is important."

"Yeah, it is," he agreed. "It's so important, they want us to forget they just got caught with their pants down. But they darn well did."

"We'll manage," Rita said. "I never threw out the blackout curtains I made. I'll put 'em up again tomorrow. It won't be so bad in the fall and winter. They made the place beastly hot in the summertime. You couldn't open a window and get a breath of fresh air unless you turned out all the lights…"

She didn't want to think about what had gone wrong. She just wanted to go on from day to day. And if she thought that way, how many hundreds of thousands of others in Los Angeles did, too? Magnified, that attitude probably showed how people back East on both sides of the border got on with their lives even though bombers appeared overhead almost every night.

Another announcer said, "Mayor Poulsen and Brigadier General van der Grift, commandant of the Southern California Military District, have jointly declared that the area is in no danger and there is no cause for alarm. Steps are being taken to ensure that what Mayor Poulsen termed, 'the recent unfortunate incident' cannot possibly recur. General van der Grift was quoted as saying,, 'Our state of readiness is high. Anyone who troubles us is asking for a bloody nose, and we will give him one." "

"Where were they before this sub started shooting at us?" Chester asked. But Rita hushed him again.

She was already busy putting up the blackout curtains when he left for work the next morning. He didn't say anything. It needed doing. And she seemed convinced it would go some little way toward winning the war. Maybe she was even right. But if she is, God help us all, Chester thought. That was one more thing he didn't say.

He bought a Times on the way to the trolley stop. The front page showed a shell hole in the oil field, as if no one had ever seen such a thing before. That made Martin want to laugh out loud. He'd seen shell holes so close together, you couldn't tell where one stopped and the next one started. Seen them? He'd huddled in them, hoping the next shell wouldn't come down on top of him. How many men his age hadn't?

But a lot of people these days were younger than he was. And women hadn't had to go to war. Talk at the trolley stop was about nothing but the shelling. Having the trolley pull up was something of a relief, but not for long. As soon as everybody got settled, the talk started up again. And the people already aboard the car must have been talking about the shelling, too, for they chimed right in.

Chester tried to concentrate on the newspaper, but had little luck. Across the aisle from him, another man who was starting to go gray also kept out of the conversation. They caught each other's eyes. The fellow across the aisle tapped his chest with a forefinger and said, "Kentucky and Tennessee. How about you?"

"Roanoke front and then northern Virginia," Chester answered. "I thought you had the look."

"I thought the same thing about you," the other middle-aged man said.

"Yeah, well…" Martin shrugged. "Everybody's running around like a chicken after the hatchet comes down. We've seen the real thing, for Christ's sake. Next to that, this isn't so much of a much."

"Yup." The other man nodded. "Try and tell anybody, though. Whoever did it stuck a pin in us so we'd jump up and down and yell,, 'Ouch!' Sure got what they wanted, too, didn't they?"

"You'd better believe it," Chester said.

Hardly anything is more pleasant than talking about why other people are a pack of damn fools. Chester and the veteran across from him enjoyed themselves till the other man climbed to his feet and said, "I get off here. Take care of yourself, Roanoke."

"You, too, Kentucky," Martin said. They nodded to each other.

A lot of the builders at the construction site were veterans, too-more than would have been true before the war started. Some of the younger men had gone into the Army or the Navy. Others were working in armament factories, hoping that would keep the government from conscripting them. Chester suspected that was a forlorn hope, but it wasn't his worry.

Most of the men who'd seen the elephant reacted the same way as Chester and the vet on the trolley had: they couldn't believe everyone else was making such a fuss over a nuisance raid. "It's here, that's why," somebody said. "The Times just had to send photographers up the coast a little ways and they got the pictures they needed for the goddamn front page. Hell, I could piss in one of those lousy little holes and fill it up."

That got a laugh. "You'd need three or four beers first, Hank," somebody else said, and got a bigger one.

Another builder spat a couple of nails into the palm of his hand. He said, "And the mayor's against people shooting at us. He's got a lot of guts to take a stand like that, doesn't he?"

"He's like the rest," another man said. "If it's got a vote in it, he's all for it. Otherwise, he thinks it's a crappy idea."

"Not a hell of a lot of votes in getting shelled," Chester observed. "And did you notice the general came out and said we'll clean their clocks the next time they try something like this? He didn't say a word about how come the sub got away this time."

"Oh, hell, no," Hank said. "That'd show everybody what an egg-sucking dog he really is."

"I think trying to cover it up is worse," Chester said. "How dumb does he think we are, anyway? We're not going to notice nobody sank the damn thing? Come on!"

"Tell you what I wish," another man said. "I wish Teddy Roosevelt was President. He'd give that Featherston bastard what-for. Smith tries hard, and I think he means well, but Jesus! The way Featherston picked his pocket last year, they ought to throw him in jail. I voted for Smith, on account of we didn't have to fight right then, but it looks like I got my pocket picked, too."

Several men nodded at that. Chester said, "I voted for Taft because I was afraid Featherston would cheat. I wish I was wrong. I've voted Socialist almost every time since the Great War. I don't like it when I don't think I can. Hell, I wish we had TR back again, too."

Were Roosevelt alive, he would have been in his eighties. So what? Chester thought. George Custer had been a hero one last time at that age. Would TR have let the general with whom his name was always linked upstage him? Martin shook his head. Not a chance. Not a chance in church.

When the door to Brigadier General Abner Dowling's office opened, he swung his swivel chair around in surprise. Not many people came to see him, and he didn't have a hell of a lot to do. He'd been staring out at the rain splashing off his window. There'd been a lot of rain lately. Watching it helped pass the time. His visitor could have caught him playing solitaire. That would have been more embarrassing.

"Hello, sir." Colonel John Abell gave him a crisp salute and a smile that, like most of the General Staff officer's, looked pasted on. "I hope I'm not interrupting anything important."

Dowling snorted. They both knew better. "Oh, yes, Colonel. I was just finishing up my latest assignment from the President-the plan that will win the war in the next three days. Remember, you heard it here first." Dowling hardly cared what he said any more. How could he get an assignment worse than this one?

Abell smiled again. This time, he actually bared his teeth. That was as much reaction as Dowling had ever got from him. He said, "Are you prepared to take command of General MacArthur's First Corps in Virginia?"

Dowling's jaw dropped. His teeth clicked together when he closed it. "If this is a joke, Colonel, it's in poor taste." Kicking a man when he's down, was what went through his head. Did Abell think he was too far down to take revenge? If Abell did… he was probably right, dammit.

But the slim, pale officer shook his head and raised his right hand as if taking an oath. "No joke, sir. General Stanbery's command car had the misfortune to drive over a mine. They think he'll live, but he'll be out of action for months. That leaves an open slot, and your name was proposed for it."

"My God. I'm sorry to hear about Sandy Stanbery's bad luck. He's a fine soldier." Dowling paused, then decided to go on: "I think I'd better ask-who proposed me? As much as I'd like to get back into action, I don't want to go down there and find out that General MacArthur wishes somebody else were in that position."

"Your sentiments do you credit," Abell said. "You don't need to worry about that, though. MacArthur asked for you by name. He said you were very helpful in his recent meeting with you, and he said bringing you in would cause fewer jealousies than promoting one of General Stanbery's subordinates to take his place."

That made some sense, anyhow. Dowling didn't know that he'd been so helpful to MacArthur, but he wasn't about to argue. He did ask, "How will this sit with the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War?"

"Well, sir, I would say that's largely up to you." Abell's pale eyes-Dowling never could decide if they were gray or light, light blue-measured him. "If the attack succeeds, how can the Joint Committee complain? If it fails, on the other hand…" He let that hang in the air.

"Yes. On the other hand." Dowling left it there, too. He hadn't thought much of what he'd heard of MacArthur's plans. He didn't think Colonel Abell had, either. Do I really want this assignment? Am I sure I do? But he did, and he was. Anything was better than sitting here counting raindrops. "I'll do my best. Can you get me a copy of the plan? I'll want to be as familiar as I can with what I'm supposed to do by the time I get down to the border. The attack should begin soon." The attack should have begun a while ago, but he didn't mention that. All the rain that had fallen lately wouldn't make things any easier.

"I'm sorry. I should have brought one with me, but I wanted to make sure you would say yes first," Abell said. "I'll have a runner get you one right away. How soon do you plan on going down to the border?"

"As soon as I can throw a change of clothes into a duffel bag-sooner, if they need me there right away," Dowling answered.

"I'll put a motorcar at your disposal," Abell said. "It will have a civilian paint job-nothing to draw special notice from the air."

"Thanks," Dowling said, and then, in a different tone of voice, "Thanks. I'll do everything I can." Colonel Abell nodded, saluted, and left.

Two hours later, Dowling was rolling south in a middle-aged Ford that was indeed thoroughly ordinary. He paid little attention to the landscape. He did notice bomb damage dropped off sharply once the motorcar got out of Philadelphia. It didn't pick up again till the Ford went through Wilmington, Delaware.

For the most part, though, he found the three-ring binder spread out on his ample lap much more interesting than the countryside. Daniel MacArthur-or rather, the clever young officers on his staff-had planned everything down to the last paper clip. MacArthur knew exactly what he wanted the First Corps to do. If everything went according to Hoyle, it could handle the job, too.

If. As usual, the word was the joker in the deck. One of the few things Dowling found inadequate in the enormous plan was its appreciation of Confederate strength. MacArthur's attitude seemed to be that the men he commanded would brush aside whatever enemy soldiers they happened to run into, march into Richmond, and hold a victory parade past the Confederate White House and Confederate Capitol.

Maybe things would work out that way. Every once in a while, they did. If the Confederate thrust through Ohio hadn't gone according to plan, Dowling would have been amazed. He shifted in the back seat. He'd been on the receiving end of that plan. Getting his own back would be sweet… if he could.

"You all right, sir?" the driver asked. He must have seen Dowling fidget in the rearview mirror.

"Yes." Dowling hoped he meant it.

The sun started to sink below the horizon as they passed from Delaware to Maryland. Dowling held the plan ever closer to his nose so he could go on studying it. One other thing that seemed to be missing from it was any notion of how bad weather would affect it. Listening to rain drum on the roof of the Ford, Dowling found the omission unfortunate. The driver turned on the slit headlights that were all anyone could use these days. They were inadequate in good weather, and almost completely useless in this storm. The motorcar slowed to a crawl. Dowling hoped other drivers would have the sense to slow to a crawl, too. Every so often, he got glimpses of wreckage hauled off to the side of the road. He could have thought of lots of things that would have done more for his confidence in the good habits of other drivers.

Outside of Baltimore, the Ford stopped crawling. That didn't mean it sped up: it stopped moving at all. "What the hell?" Dowling said irritably, wondering if Abell shouldn't have laid an airplane on for him instead.

"Some kind of mess up ahead. We'll find out when we get there." The driver sounded philosophical.

That did little to ease Dowling's irritation. "If we get there, you mean," he growled. There was barely enough light to let him see the driver's shoulders go up and down in a shrug.

They took twenty minutes to go half a mile to the trouble. A bomb crater rendered the road impassable south- and northbound. Engineers had just finished spreading steel matting of the sort that made instant airstrips out to either side of the damage. Without it, motorcars would have bogged down in the mud when they went off the road and onto the shoulder. With it, Dowling felt as if he were being shaken to pieces. He breathed a sigh of relief when the Ford got on the road again.

The relief didn't last. No sooner had they got into Baltimore than the Confederates started bombing it. With that cloud cover overhead, the enemy bombers couldn't hope to be accurate. But they didn't seem to care. The bombs would come down somewhere on U.S. soil. If they didn't blow up ships in the harbor or factories or warehouses, they'd flatten shops or apartments or houses. And if they hit a school or a hospital or a church-well, that was just one of those things. U.S. pilots didn't lose sleep over it, either.

Cops and civil-defense wardens were shouting for everybody to get off the streets. "Keep going," Dowling told the driver. The man shrugged again and obeyed.

Somewhere near the middle of town, a warden stepped in front of the Ford. He almost got himself run over for his trouble. "Are you out of your frigging mind?" he yelled as a bomb crashed down a few hundred yards away. "Get into a cellar, or the undertaker will bury you in a jam tin."

"What do we do, sir?" the driver asked Dowling. "Your call."

Before Dowling could answer, a bomb went off much closer than the one a minute before. A fragment of casing clanged into the Ford's trunk. Another pierced the left front tire, which made the auto list. And another got the civil-defense warden, who howled and went down in the middle of the wet street.

"I think we just had our minds made up for us," Dowling said as he opened the door. "Let's give this poor bastard a hand, shall we?"

The warden was lucky, if you wanted to call getting wounded lucky. The gouge was on the back of his calf, and fairly clean as such things went. He was already struggling back to his feet again by the time Dowling and the driver came over to him. "Let me get bandaged up and I'll go back on duty," he insisted.

Dowling doubted that; the wound was larger and deeper than the warden seemed to think it was. But it hadn't hamstrung him, as it would have were it a little lower. "Where's the closest cellar?" Dowling asked. "We'll get you patched up, and then we'll worry about what happens next."

"Just you follow me," the civil-defense warden said. Dowling and the driver ended up hauling him along with his arms draped over their shoulders. Trying to put weight on the leg showed him he was hurt worse than he'd thought. He guided them to a hotel down the block. Dowling was soaked by the time he got there. Manhandling the warden down the stairs to the cellar was another adventure, but he and the driver managed.

People in the cellar exclaimed at the spectacle of a bedraggled brigadier general. All Dowling said was, "Is there a doctor in the house?" For a wonder, there was. He went to work on the wounded warden. Dowling turned to his driver. "Do you think you can fix that flat once the bombs stop falling?"

"I'll give it my best shot, sir," the driver said resignedly.

It took more work than he'd expected, for the fragment that got the trunk had torn into the spare tire and inner tube. The driver had to wait till a cop came by, explain his predicament to him, and wait again till the policeman came back with a fresh tire and tube. They didn't get moving again till well after midnight.

As Dowling fitfully dozed in the back seat, he hoped the driver wasn't dozing behind the wheel. The Ford didn't crash into another auto or go off the road, so the driver evidently managed to keep his eyes open.

More problems with the road stalled them outside of Washington. The driver did start snoring then. Dowling let him do it till things started moving again. They didn't get through the de jure capital of the USA until after dawn. That let Dowling see that Confederate bombers had hit it even harder than Philadelphia. Still, it wasn't the almost lunar landscape it had been after the USA took it back from the CSA in the Great War.

The Confederates had knocked out the regular bridges over the Potomac. Engineers had run up pontoon bridges to take up the slack. The Ford bumped into what had been Virginia and was now an eastern extension of West Virginia.

Daniel MacArthur made his headquarters near the little town of Manassas, scene of the first U.S. defeat-but far from the last-in the War of Secession. As Dowling, wet and weary, got out of the motorcar, he hoped that wasn't an omen.

Waiting for the first big U.S. attack to go in wasn't easy for Flora Blackford. If it succeeded, it would bring the war back to something approaching an even keel. If it failed… She shook her head. She refused to think about what might happen if it failed. It would succeed. It would.

Ordinary business had to go on while she waited along with the rest of the United States. Studying the budget was part of ordinary business. If you looked long enough, you learned to spot all sorts of interesting things.

Some of the most interesting were the ones that were most puzzling. Why was there a large Interior Department appropriation for construction work in western Washington? And why didn't the item explain what the work was for?

She called an undersecretary and tried to find out. He said, "Hold on, Congresswoman. Let me see what you're talking about. Give me the page number, if you'd be so kind." She did, and listened to him flipping paper. "All right. I see the item," he told her. Close to half a minute of silence followed, and then a sheepish laugh. "To tell you the truth, Congresswoman, I have no idea what that's about. It does seem a little unusual, doesn't it?"

"It seems more than a little unusual to me," Flora answered. "Who would know something about it?"

"Why don't you try Assistant Secretary Goodwin?" the undersecretary said. "Hydroelectric is his specialty."

"I'll do that," Flora said. "Let me have his number, please." She wrote it down. "Thanks very much." She hung up and dialed again.

Assistant Secretary Goodwin had a big, deep voice. He sounded more important than the junior functionary with whom she'd spoken a moment before. But when she pointed out the item that puzzled her, what he said was, "Well, I'll be… darned. What's that doing there?"

"I was hoping you could tell me," Flora said pointedly.

"Congresswoman, this is news to me," Goodwin said. She believed him. He seemed angry in a special bureaucratic way: the righteous indignation of a man who'd had his territory encroached upon. She didn't think anyone could fake that particular tone of voice.

Tapping a pencil on her desk, she asked, "If you don't know, who's likely to?"

"It would have to be the secretary himself," Goodwin answered. "Let's see which one of us can call him first. I aim to get to the bottom of this, too."

The Secretary of the Interior was a Midwesterner named Wallace. The first time Flora tried to reach him, his secretary said he was on another line. Goodwin must have dialed faster. "I'll have him call you back, if you like," the secretary added.

"Yes. Thank you. Please do that." Flora gave her the number and returned the handset to its cradle. She did some more pencil tapping. Were they just passing the buck? Her mouth tightened. If they were, they'd be sorry.

She jumped a little when the telephone rang a few minutes later. Bertha said, "It's Assistant Secretary Roosevelt, Congresswoman."

"Oh!" Flora said. She'd been expecting the Secretary of the Interior. She wondered what Roosevelt wanted. More propaganda? She shrugged. Only one way to find out. "Put him through, please."

"Hello, Congresswoman." As usual, Franklin Roosevelt sounded jaunty. No one who didn't know would ever imagine he couldn't get out of his wheelchair. "How are you this lovely morning?"

It wasn't lovely; it was still raining. Even so, Flora couldn't help smiling. "I'm well, thanks," she answered. "And you?"

"In the pink," Roosevelt said. "I just had a call from Hank. He thought I might be able to tell you what was going on."

"Hank?" Flora echoed with a frown. "Hank who? You're a step or two ahead of me."

"Wallace," Roosevelt told her. "You've been talking to people about that Washington State item in the Interior Department budget. It's no wonder nobody over there knows anything much about it. It really has more to do with my shop, if you must know."

"With the War Department?" Flora said. "Why isn't it listed under War Department appropriations, in that case?" Curiouser and curiouser, she thought.

Roosevelt coughed a couple of times. He sounded faintly embarrassed as he answered, "Well, Congresswoman, one reason is that we didn't want to draw the Confederates' notice and make them wonder what we were doing way out there." He laughed. "So we drew your notice and made you wonder instead. Seems we can't win."

"So you did," Flora said. "What are you doing way out there? Something large, by the size of the appropriation you're asking for."

"I'm sorry, but I can't tell you what it is," Roosevelt said.

"What?" Now Flora really did start to get angry. "What do you mean, you can't? If you don't want to talk to me here, Mr. Roosevelt, you can answer questions under oath in front of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. Now-what sort of boondoggle has the War Department got going on in Washington State?"

"We don't believe it's a boondoggle. We wouldn't be working on it if we did," Roosevelt answered. "And you can summon me to the Joint Committee, no doubt about it. But if you do, I will lie like Ananias. That will be the best possible way for me to serve my country. I will be convincing, too. Your colleagues, or enough of them, will believe me. And, of course, I will deny we ever had this conversation."

He meant every word of it. Flora had dealt with a lot of recalcitrant bureaucrats. Once in a great while, one of them would dig in his heels and refuse to move. Plainly, that was what was happening here. Flora didn't understand why, though. "What could possibly be so important?" she asked.

"I can't tell you that, either," Roosevelt said. "I will tell you that it is more important than my job. If you want to send me to the calaboose for contempt of Congress, I will cheerfully go. It is that important. It is so important, I am going to ask you to let me sell you a pig in a poke and trust me without asking any more questions. If you do, I will thank you. If you don't, Jake Featherston will. Up to you."

He meant every word of that, too. Whether he was right or wrong was a different question-and he didn't want to give Flora any clues that would let her decide. She said, "You don't make this easy, do you?"

"Few things in wartime are easy. Figuring out whether to keep this secret is one of them," he answered.

"If you turn out to be wrong, Mr. Roosevelt, there is no place in the world you can hide from me," Flora said.

"That's fair," Roosevelt said at once. "If you have a price, I will pay it. The administration will pay it. You were unhappy President Smith hasn't said more about the way the CSA treats its Negroes. He could. He would. He will, if you like."

"The last time we talked about this, you said it was between the President and me," Flora reminded him. "You told me you couldn't do anything about it. I believed you." Of course she'd believed him. What he'd told her was the way things always worked in the U.S. government-or any other. "Why have you changed your mind? Why do you think he'll change his?"

"Because he agrees with me about how important this is-and how important keeping it secret is," Franklin Roosevelt answered.

Flora didn't ask him if he could deliver. She had no doubt he could. But what was so very important out there by the Pacific that Al Smith would change a political position he'd taken after the coldest of calculations? She started to ask the Assistant Secretary of War. Only one thing held her back: the certainty that he wouldn't tell her.

Slowly, she said, "I think I will take you up on that. This war has a moral element. We aren't just fighting it to protect ourselves, though we certainly are doing that. But the Confederates are committing crimes against humanity. They need to be stopped."

"Crimes against humanity," Roosevelt echoed. Flora could hear the faint scrape of pen on paper. "It's a good phrase, a telling phrase. You'll hear it again. Is there anything else?"

There was one thing more-the secret Roosevelt was willing to pay any price to preserve. Again, though, Flora knew he wouldn't tell her. "No, I don't think so," she answered, and wondered what sort of deal she'd just made. Franklin Roosevelt wasn't her idea of the Devil-but how could she be sure?

She couldn't. That bothered her more than anything. She'd done it anyhow. Done what, exactly? Agreed to keep quiet about something he wished she'd never found in the first place. It was almost as if she'd discovered him being unfaithful to his wife.

Would she have kept quiet about something like that? She didn't suppose she would have gone out of her way to talk about it, but… She didn't suppose Roosevelt could have offered such a tempting bargain about that, either.

What on earth was going on out there to make them willing to go so far to cover it up? Flora laughed. She almost wanted to be difficult just so she could find out.

She wondered if they were developing some fancy new poison gas. Western Washington was full of empty square miles. If you wanted to experiment with something toxic, you wouldn't do it in New York City. You'd go someplace where a mishap wouldn't turn into a disaster.

Slowly, Flora nodded to herself. If she had to bet, she would have put her money on something like that. The longer the Confederates didn't know what was going on, the shorter the time they'd have to start working on an antidote or new protective clothing or whatever they'd need to neutralize the weapon once the United States trotted it out.

She nodded again. That left her more or less satisfied, but it also left her more than a little miffed. No matter how she'd threatened Roosevelt, she wasn't about to start screaming about a new poison gas from the housetops. She wanted this war won, too. Didn't Roosevelt see that? Evidently not. He'd promised her the sun, moon, and little stars to keep her mouth shut instead.

The telephone in the outer office rang. Bertha answered it. She called, "Congresswoman, it's the President."

Flora picked up the phone on her desk. "Hello, Mr. President," she said.

"Hello, sweetheart," Al Smith answered. "So you want me to squawk about the shvartzers, do you? So all right, I'll do it." Like a lot of New York Irish politicians, he could sound very Jewish when he wanted to.

"That's… kind of you, sir," Flora said. "I still don't quite understand why you're raising such a fuss."

"I know," Smith said. "Franklin made the deal with you so you wouldn't ask questions, remember, not so you would."

"Oh, yes. I remember. I'm not likely to forget," Flora answered. "If you meet your end, I'll meet mine." She said that with a curious reluctance. "I won't ask any questions. I won't poke my nose where it doesn't belong. But if you think I won't be ready to blow up from curiosity, you'd better think again."

Al Smith laughed. Even then, he sounded tired. "Well, I've been worrying about some bigger bangs than that lately."

"Not likely," Flora said. The President laughed again. He made a kissing noise over the telephone and hung up. Flora smiled as she did, too. She was still curious, but she didn't feel quite so bad about the bargain now.

Major Jonathan Moss bounced to a stop at an airstrip outside a Maryland town with the odd name of Texas. One after another, the rest of his fighter squadron landed behind him-all except one pilot, who'd had engine trouble and had to come down somewhere in western Pennsylvania. Moss hoped the missing man would get repairs and rejoin the squadron soon. By the looks of things here in the East, they were going to need all the help they could get.

Led by a groundcrew man with wigwag flags, Moss taxied into a revetment. As soon as his prop had stopped spinning, more groundcrew men spread camouflage netting over his Wright. He slid back the canopy and climbed out.

"Looks like the balloon's going to go up here pretty soon," he remarked.

"Beats me," the groundcrew man answered. "Far as I'm concerned, we've already been sitting around too long with our thumbs up our asses."

A man of strong convictions, Moss thought, amused. But then again, why not? Everybody in the USA seemed to wonder why the attack here in the East hadn't started yet. Moss' flying boots dug into mud as he walked out of the revetment. The rain had messed things up. He knew that. And the high command here was pulling together whatever it could to add to the fight. But didn't the powers that be think the Confederates were doing the same damn thing?

Martin Rolvaag came out of another revetment. Moss' wingman waved to him. "At least we didn't have to fight our way across Ohio," Rolvaag said.

"That occurred to me, too," Moss admitted. "Can't say I'm sorry we didn't."

"Way it looks to me, we can't do more than one big thing at a time, and neither can the Confederates," Rolvaag said. "As soon as one side or the other manages to run two full-scale attacks at once, it'll have the edge."

"Makes sense," Moss said. Rolvaag usually did. Along with the rest of the pilots from the squadron, they walked toward the biggest camouflaged tent nearby. Either that would hold local headquarters, in which case they could get billeted, or it would be the local officers' club, in which case they could get lit.

It turned out to be local headquarters. Several fliers looked disappointed. Moss was a little disappointed himself, but only a little. They'd be going into action soon, and he didn't want to fly hung over. Some of the younger guys didn't give a damn. Back in the Great War, he hadn't given a damn, either.

The captain who let them know where they'd be eating and sleeping (and who told them where the officers' club was, so they could drink, too) only shrugged when Moss asked him when the U.S. push toward Richmond would start. "Sir, when the orders come in, they'll get to you, I promise. We won't leave you on the ground," he said. "Past that, you know as much as I do."

"I don't know a damn thing," Moss complained. The captain just nodded, as if to say they were still even.

After supper, Moss did find his way to the officers' club. Blackout curtains inside the tent flap made sure no light leaked out. The fog of cigarette smoke inside would have done a pretty good job of dimming the light even without the curtains. Along with tobacco, the air smelled of beer and whiskey and sweat.

Moss made his way up to the bar and ordered a beer. He reminded himself that drink wasn't spelled with a u. As he sipped, he listened to the chatter around him. When he discovered that the three men immediately to his left were reconnaissance pilots, he started picking their brains. If anybody could tell him what the Confederates were up to, they were the men.

But they couldn't tell him much. One said, "Bastards know how to palm their cards as well as we do. If they haven't got more than they're showing, we'll waltz into Richmond. 'Course, I hope to hell they're saying,, 'Sure don't look like them damnyankees got much up there a-tall." " His impression of a Confederate accent was less than successful.

"Here's hoping," Moss agreed. A second beer followed the first. He had a few more over the evening. He didn't get drunk-he was sure of that-but he did get happy. He heard about as many opinions of Daniel MacArthur as there were people offering them.

Not long after he hit the sack, Confederate bombers came overhead. They were doing their best to disrupt what they had to know was coming. Moss ran for a damp trench. He didn't think any of their load hit the airstrip, but it wasn't coming down very far away. He hoped U.S. bombers were paying similar calls on the defenders. Soldiers who went without sleep didn't fight as well as those who got their rest.

Orders for his squadron came in the next morning. He'd wondered if they'd been sent east to escort bombers. They hadn't had any training or practice in that role. But instead the command was ground attack. Moss nodded to himself. They could handle that just fine. And he had a date-three days hence. He talked with men who'd been in Maryland longer about local landmarks and Confederate antiaircraft.

The day of the attack dawned cold and gloomy. Moss yawned as he went to his fighter. He didn't like the low clouds overhead. They would make it harder for him to find his targets. He managed a shrug. His squadron wouldn't be the only one hitting the Confederates. He could probably tag along with someone else.

He ran through his flight checks with impatience, but was no less thorough because he was impatient. Like a modern automobile, the Wright had a self-starter. No groundcrew man needed to spin the prop for him. He poked the button. The engine roared to life; the propeller blurred into a disk.

He raced down the runway and flung himself into the air. One by one, the airplanes in his squadron followed. They rocketed south toward Virginia and the enemy. Moss got the feeling of being part of something much bigger than himself. He'd known it in the Great War, too, but seldom in this fight.

As they got farther south, the clouds began to break up. That was a relief. Maybe the people who'd ordered the attack weren't complete idiots after all. Then again, you never could tell. Moss got a quick glimpse of Washington, D.C., before he zoomed over the Potomac. Plumes of smoke rose here and there from the formal capital-for all practical purposes, the former capital. Confederate bombers must have visited there the night before. Not even Y-ranging had helped fighters do much to track bombers by night.

After the Potomac, the next good-sized river was the Rappahannock. If U.S. soldiers could get over the Rappahannock and the Rapidan, the next stop was Richmond, which lay on the north bank of the James.

Crossing the Rappahannock wouldn't be a whole lot of fun, though. Confederate artillery was zeroed in on the river, and pounded the pontoon bridges U.S. military engineers were running up under the not quite adequate cover of their own artillery. Asskickers were out dive-bombing those bridges, too. Moss watched one crash into the Rappahannock in flames. Somebody had thought to bring plenty of antiaircraft guns forward, then. Good.

And there were plenty of Confederate antiaircraft guns right up at the front, too. Shells began bursting around Moss and his squadron even while they were on the U.S. side of the Rappahannock. He hoped those came from Confederate guns. He didn't like the idea of getting shot down by his own side. Come to that, he didn't like the idea of getting shot down by the enemy, either.

He dove on a battery of Confederate artillery pieces. He could damn well shoot back at the bastards on the other side. He thumbed the firing button. His Wright seemed to stagger a little in the air from the recoil of the guns. Soldiers in butternut scattered as he roared past overhead. Muzzle flashes showed that some of them were taking potshots at him with whatever small arms they carried. He wasn't going to lose any sleep over that-he was gone before they could hope to aim.

He had more targets than he could shake a stick at. The Confederates had known this attack was coming, and they'd spent a lot of time getting ready for it. That worried Moss. When the Confederates struck for Lake Erie, they'd caught the USA by surprise. Maybe they shouldn't have, but so what? Surprise had helped them go as far and as fast as they had.

Surprise wouldn't do the USA a nickel's worth of good here. Could a major armored thrust succeed without it? Moss didn't know. One way or the other, he'd find out. And so would everybody else.

He shot up another artillery position, and a battalion's worth of infantrymen he caught in the open. He'd pitied the poor foot soldiers in the last war. Their lot was, if anything, worse now. The fighters he and the Confederates were flying now were ever so much more deadly as ground-attack machines than their Great War ancestors had been. Barrels were correspondingly more dangerous, too. Even the poison gas was more poisonous than it had been a generation earlier.

When Moss tried to strafe some more infantrymen, his guns emptied in the middle of the burst. Time to head for home, he thought, and hoped no Hound Dog would jump him on the way back to Maryland. All he could do was run away.

From the squadron's wireless traffic, a lot of the other pilots were in the same boat. "Let's go back," Moss said. "They can reload us, and then we'll hit 'em again." Savage sounds of approval dinned in his earphones.

Finding Texas, Maryland, wasn't easy, even though the clouds had thinned out up there, too. He knew how things had looked going from north to south. They didn't look the same coming back from south to north. They never did. Anyone who drove a motorcar knew that. The problem was ten times worse in an airplane.

He finally spotted the town by the nearby ponds that had once been mine shafts. If they were there, then the airstrip was… there. He bumped to a landing. It wasn't pretty, but he'd take it.

Groundcrew men swarmed over the fighters. He got refueled. Armorers took out the empty ammunition belts and loaded in full ones. An officer came out of the headquarters tent with a map. He pointed a few miles west of where Moss and his squadron had been strafing. Moss called his pilots to gather around so they got a look at the map, too. After a little while, everybody nodded. Moss thought he knew how to get there.

As it happened, the squadron never did. They'd come into U.S.-held West Virginia and were heading for Confederate Virginia when they ran into a squadron of Hound Dogs flying north to shoot up the men in green-gray who wanted to invade their country. Fliers from each side spotted the other at about the same time. Both sides started shooting at about the same time, too.

Nobody'd planned the fight. Nobody'd expected it. Nobody backed away from it, either. It was a wild melee. Both Wrights and Hound Dogs were already on the deck; they had no altitude to give up. They just darted and swooped and fired. Gunners down below-Moss was damned if he knew whose gunners-seemed to blaze away impartially at both sides.

Moss thought he hit a Hound Dog, but the Confederate fighter kept flying. A Wright smashed into the ground. A fireball blossomed where it went down. He swore. That was one of his men surely dead; nobody could hope to bail out this low. A Hound Dog limped off toward the south trailing smoke. Moss hoped it crashed, too.

After several more airplanes went down or had to pull out of the fight, both sides broke off, as if licking their wounds. Moss and his squadron didn't shoot up the Confederates in northern Virginia. The Hound Dogs didn't shoot up U.S. soldiers in eastern West Virginia (they would have called it occupied northern Virginia). They'd battled one another to a standstill. At the moment, as far as he was concerned, that would have to do.

Armstrong Grimes sat cross-legged in front of a campfire on the outskirts of Provo, Utah. He leaned close to the flames. The night was chilly, and he had his tunic off. He was sewing a second stripe onto his left sleeve, and not having an easy time of it. "My aunt ought to be doing this, goddammit," he grumbled.

Across the fire from him, Rex Stowe was sewing a third stripe onto his sleeve. He raised an eyebrow. "Your aunt?"

"Yeah." Armstrong nodded. "She's only two years older than me. My granny got married again right when the Great War ended, and she had a kid just a little before my ma did. Clara would be good at this-and it would piss her off, too. We fight like cats and dogs."

"All right." Stowe laughed and shrugged. "Whatever makes you happy."

"What'd make me happy is getting the hell out of here," Armstrong said. "You fix that up for me, Corp-uh, Sarge?"

Stowe laughed again. "In your dreams. And now all the fresh young dumb ones can call you Corporal. Looks to me like we've got two ways to leave Utah any time soon. We can get wounded-or we can get killed."

It looked like that to Armstrong, too. He'd hoped Stowe would tell him something different. Not too far away, a machine gun started hammering. Armstrong and Stowe both paused in their sewing. Tunics or no tunics, they were ready to grab their rifles and do whatever they had to do to keep breathing. Then the gunfire stopped. The two noncoms looked at each other. "Is that good or bad?" Armstrong asked.

"Dunno," Stowe answered. "If they just overran one of our machine-gun nests, it's pretty bad, though." He pointed to a couple of privates. "Ustinov! Trotter! Go see what the hell's going on with that gun. Try not to get killed while you're doing it, in case the Mormons have got the position."

"Right, Sarge." The two men slipped away. Grimes didn't think a machine gun could fall with so little fuss, but the Mormons had already come up with too many surprises to leave him sure of anything.

He waited. If Ustinov and Trotter didn't come back pretty soon, the Army was going to need a lot more than two guys to set things right. Stowe must have thought the same thing. He put his tunic back on even though his new stripes were only half attached. So did Armstrong.

No gun suddenly turned the wrong way started spitting bullets. A sentry not far from the fire called a challenge. Armstrong heard a low-voiced answer. He couldn't make out what it was. That was good, because one of the Mormons' little games was to steal countersigns and use them to sneak infiltrators in among the U.S. soldiers. If Armstrong couldn't hear the countersign, odds were the enemy couldn't, either.

He shook his head at that. Up till a few weeks before, the Mormons hadn't been the enemy. They'd been his fellow citizens. But they didn't want to stay in the USA, any more than the Confederates had. The Confederates had made secession stick. They were genuine, sure-as-hell foreigners these days. The Mormons wanted to be, but the United States weren't about to let them go.

Ustinov and Trotter came back in. Trotter said, "Gun's still ours, Sergeant. He squeezed off a burst on account of he thought he saw something moving out in front of him."

"Thanks," Stowe said. "You guys did good. Sit your butts down and take it easy for a couple minutes."

Ustinov laughed. He was a big bear of a man; the noise reminded Armstrong of a rockslide rumbling down the side of a valley. "You take it easy around here, you start talking out of a new mouth," he said, and ran a finger across his throat in case anybody had trouble figuring out what he meant.

He wasn't wrong, either. The Mormons were playing for keeps. They'd tried rising up once before. The USA had pushed their faces into the dirt and sat on them for twenty years afterwards. They had to know that whatever happened to them if they lost again would be even worse. And they had to know the odds were all against their winning. They'd risen again anyhow. That spoke of either amazing stupidity or undying hatred-maybe both.

Hardly any Mormons surrendered. Not many U.S. soldiers were in much of a mood to take prisoners even when they got the chance. Every now and again, the Mormons took some. Oddly, Armstrong had never heard that they mistreated them. On the contrary-they stuck to the Geneva Convention straight down the line.

When he mentioned that, Sergeant Stowe spat into the campfire. "So what? Bunch of holier-than-thou sons of bitches," he said. Heads bobbed up and down. Armstrong didn't argue. How could he? If the Mormons hadn't been a pack of fanatics, would they have rebelled against all the might the United States could throw at them?

Later that night, U.S. bombers paid a call on Provo. They weren't the most modern models. Those went up against the Confederates-Armstrong hoped the attack in Virginia was going well. But the Mormons didn't have any night fighters, and they didn't have much in the way of antiaircraft guns. Second-line airplanes were plenty good enough for knocking their towns flat.

After the explosions to the north and west had stopped, a couple of Mormon two-deckers buzzed over the U.S. lines and dropped small-probably homemade-bombs on them. "Goddamn flying sewing machines," Armstrong grumbled, jolted out of a sound sleep by the racket.

Antiaircraft guns and machine guns turned the sky into a fireworks display with tracers. As far as Armstrong could tell, they didn't hit anything. If they fired off a lot of ammo, people would think they were doing their job. The racket killed whatever chance he'd had of going back to sleep.

When morning came, the Mormons started firing the mortars they used in place of conventional artillery. Like what passed for their air force, the mortars weren't as good as the real thing. Also like the makeshift bombers, the ersatz artillery was a lot better than nothing. And cries of, "Gas!" made Armstrong snarl curses as he put on his mask.

He wasn't the only one. "How are we supposed to fight in these goddamn things?" Trotter demanded.

Sergeant Stowe took care of that: "Can't very well fight if you suck in a gulp of mustard gas, either." He already had his mask on. From behind it, his voice sounded as if it came from the other side of the grave, but he wore the mask to make sure it didn't.

U.S. artillery wasted little time in answering. Some of the shells the U.S. guns flung gurgled as they flew: they were gas rounds, too. In a way, that pleased Armstrong; he wanted the Mormons to catch hell. In another way, though, it mattered very little, because the U.S. bombardment didn't do much to stop the hell he was catching.

Somebody not nearly far enough away started screaming like a damned soul. That was a man badly wounded, not somebody who'd been gassed. The ordinary Mormon mortar rounds produced a hail of nasty fragments and splinters when they burst. Some poor bastard had stopped at least one.

Mortar bombs were still falling, too. Some of them made the ground shake when they hit. Armstrong didn't know much about earthquakes, not when he'd grown up in Washington, D.C. He did know he wanted terra to stay firma under him.

The wounded man kept screaming. Armstrong swore under his breath. Someone had to go get the sorry son of a bitch and bring him in. Someone, at the moment, looked remarkably like him. He was no hero. All he wanted to do was get out of this war with a whole skin. But if that were him screaming, he would also have wanted his buddies to bring him in if they could.

Scrambling out of his hole was one of the hardest things he'd ever made himself do, and he'd been in combat since the Confederates bombed Camp Custer. Once in the open, he flattened out like a toad after a steamroller ran over it. His belly never left the ground as he crawled ahead and sideways. Sharp rocks poked him in the stomach. With bullets and sharper fragments snarling by much too close overhead, the pebbles were the least of his worries.

He found the wounded man. It was Ustinov. His left arm ended just above the wrist. He was holding on to the stump with his right hand, slowing the bleeding. "Oh, shit," Armstrong said softly. He bent and pulled the lace out of one of Ustinov's shoes. "Hang on, pal. I'll fix you a tourniquet." Ustinov nodded. He didn't stop screaming.

Armstrong tied the tourniquet as tight as he could. Maybe that cost Ustinov some extra agony. Maybe he was already feeling as much as one man could. The noise he made never changed. Armstrong fumbled at his belt till he found the morphine syringe every soldier carried. Awkwardly, he stuck the wounded man and pushed the plunger home.

He hoped for some immediate change, but didn't see one. Shrugging, he said, "We've got to get you out of here. I'll help you out of the hole. Then you climb on my back, and I'll do the best I can." He was a good-sized man himself, but Ustinov was bigger.

Getting Ustinov out of the foxhole was a bitch. Again, Armstrong wasn't sure whether he hurt the other man worse by shoving him up. He was afraid he did. But it had to be done. When Ustinov got on top of him, he felt as if he'd been tackled. He crawled on anyhow. He was about halfway back to his own foxhole when Ustinov sighed and stopped screaming. The morphine must have taken hold at last.

Trotter and Yossel Reisen were on their way out after him when he brought Ustinov in. When Trotter saw what had happened to Ustinov, he said some of the same things as Armstrong had.

"Where the hell are the corpsmen?" Armstrong growled.

"They were coming up," Reisen answered. "A mortar burst caught them. They're both down."

"Oh." With news like that, Armstrong had nothing else to say.

"Neither one of them is as bad off as he is." Reisen pointed to Ustinov.

"One second I was fine. The next… I looked down, and my hand was gone." Ustinov sounded quiet and calm. That was the morphine talking.

"Take him back, you two," Armstrong told Trotter and Reisen.

"Right, Corporal," the privates said together. They couldn't complain. Armstrong had already done his share and then some.

He got back into his foxhole with nothing but relief. "You ought to pick up a Bronze Star for that," Sergeant Stowe said. "Maybe a Silver Star."

"Fuck it," Armstrong said. "Not a guy here who wouldn't do the same for his pals. I don't give a damn about the medal. He was making a racket, and I wanted him to shut up."

"There you go." Stowe laughed, or at least bared his teeth and made noises that sounded amused. "You were a brand new conscript when this shit started, weren't you?" Armstrong nodded. The sergeant said, "Well, you're sure as hell not a raw conscript any more, are you?"

"Doesn't look that way," Armstrong allowed.

Dive bombers roared down on the Mormon positions at the southern edge of Provo. Armstrong hoped they were blowing up the mortars that had caused so much torment. He wouldn't have bet too much on it, though. Unlike ordinary artillery pieces, mortars broke down easily into man-portable loads. They were made to shoot and scoot.

Three barrels of Great War vintage waddled up to the front. Their crews must have been wearing masks, for the gas didn't faze them. A Mormon with a bottle of burning gasoline-a Featherston Fizz-incinerated one at the cost of his own life. The other two led U.S. foot soldiers, Armstrong among them, deeper into Provo.

Like most of Richmond, Clarence Potter lived suspended between hope and fear. The damnyankees were coming-everybody knew that. Whether they'd get there was a different question. Brigadier General Potter hoped it was, anyhow.

Unlike most of the people in the Confederate States, he knew U.S. forces were over the Rappahannock and pushing down toward the Rapidan. The wireless just talked about heavy defensive fighting. Broadcasts also had a lot to say about the losses Confederate forces were inflicting on the enemy. As far as Potter could tell, those losses were genuine. But the wireless didn't mention whatever the Yankees were doing to the Confederate defenders.

Even before the latest U.S. push, people in Richmond had been able to hear the artillery duels to the north. Now there was no escaping that low rumble. It went on day and night. If it was louder than it had been a few days earlier, if the guns were closer than they had been… Potter tried not to dwell on that. By the way other people talked, they were doing the same thing.

His work at the War Department kept him too busy to pay too much heed to the battle to the north. He knew what he would do and where he would go if he got an evacuation order. Plans had long since been laid for that. Until the hour, if it came, he would go on as he always had.

As he always had, he worked long into the night. Now, though, U.S. bombers visited Richmond every night after the sun went down. Wave after wave of them pounded the Confederate capital. Potter spent more time than he would have wanted in the shelter in the bowels of the building instead of at his desk. Even if everything above ground fell in, a tunnel would take people in the shelter to safety. Potter wished he could take his work with him. He even longed for the days when he'd been subterranean all the time. His prewar promotion to an office with a window had its drawbacks. In the general shelter, too many unauthorized eyes could see pieces of what he was up to. Security trumped productivity.

Considering one of his projects, that was very true indeed. He still waited for results from it. He had no idea how long he would have to go on waiting, or if it would ever come to fruition. Logically, it should, but whether evidence that it had would ever appear to someone who could get word back to him was another open question.

Before the U.S. onslaught, Jake Featherston had called him about it two or three times. Featherston didn't have the patience to make a good intelligence man. He wanted things to happen right now, regardless of whether they were ripe. That driving, almost demoniac, energy had taken the Confederate States a long way in the direction he wanted them to go, but not all problems yielded to a hearty kick in the behind. The President of the CSA sometimes had trouble seeing that.

People who came to the office every day spoke of the pounding Richmond was taking. Potter hardly ever got out of the War Department, and so saw less of that destruction than most people.

The U.S. attack disrupted his news gathering-his spying-on the other side of the border more than he'd thought it would. Some of his sources were too busy doing their nominal jobs to have the chance to send information south. That frustrated him to the point where he reminded himself of Featherston.

He ate when he got the chance. As often as not, he had someone go to what passed for the War Department canteen and bring him back something allegedly edible. Half the time, he didn't notice what it was. Considering what the canteen turned out, that might have been a blessing.

Every once in a while, he emerged from his lair. He felt like a bear coming out of its den after a long winter when he did. By the way the inside of his mouth tasted after too much coffee and too many cigarettes, the comparison was more apt than he would have liked.

Once, he walked into the canteen at the same time as Nathan Bedford Forrest III. The head of the Confederate General Staff looked even more weary, rumpled, and disheveled than he did. Forrest was also in a perfectly foul temper. Fixing Potter with as baleful a stare as the spymaster had ever got, the younger officer growled, "God damn those nigger sons of bitches to hell, so the Devil can fry 'em even blacker than they are already."

"What now?" Potter asked with a sinking feeling.

"We had two big trainloads of barrels that were supposed to get up here from Birmingham, so we could gas 'em up, put crews in 'em, and throw 'em into the fight against the damnyankees. Two!" Forrest said. "Fucking niggers planted mines under both sets of train tracks. Blew two locomotives to hell and gone, derailed God only knows how many freight cars, and now those stinking barrels won't get here for another three days at the earliest. At the earliest!" He was extravagantly dismayed and even more extravagantly furious.

"Ouch!" Potter said. He didn't ask what the delay would do to the defense of northern Virginia. The answer to that was only too obvious: nothing good. Instead, he chose the question that touched him professionally: "How did the coons find out those trains were on the way?"

Lieutenant General Forrest looked even grimmer than he had before. "I've asked General Cummins the very same thing. So far, he hasn't come up with answers that do me any good." His expression said that the head of Counterintelligence had better come up with such answers in a tearing hurry if he wanted to keep his own head from rolling.

The canteen line snaked forward. Potter picked up a tray and a paper napkin and some silverware. So did Forrest. Potter got a dispirited salad and a ham sandwich. Forrest chose a bowl of soup and some of the greasiest fried chicken Potter had ever seen. He wondered what the cooks had fried it in. Crankcase oil? He wouldn't have been surprised.

Forrest followed him to a table. They sat down together. The head of the General Staff went right on cursing and fuming. Potter had the rank and the security clearance to listen to his rant. After a while, when Forrest ran down a little, Potter asked, "Do you think the damnyankees knew about those trains and tipped off the raiders?"

"That's the way I'd bet right now." Nathan Bedford Forrest III demolished a drumstick, plainly not caring what he ate as long as it filled his belly. "General Cummins says it isn't possible. I wish I thought he was right, but I just can't believe it. The timing was too goddamn good. For them to nail both those trains within an hour of each other… They knew they were coming, all right."

"I agree," Potter said crisply-which was not a word he could use to describe the lettuce in his salad. "You can only bend the long arm of coincidence so far before you break it."

"Yeah." Forrest slurped up soup with the same methodical indifference he'd shown the chicken. "General Cummins thinks otherwise… but he's got his prestige on the line. If the niggers figured it out all by themselves, then his shop doesn't look bad."

Potter didn't say anything to that. Instead, he took a big bite of his ham sandwich-and regretted it. Virginia made some of the finest ham in the world, none of which had gone between those two slices of bread. But Forrest was liable to see any comment he made about Cummins as self-serving.

Forrest scowled across the table at him. "What can you tell me about this business? Anything?"

"Right this minute, sir, no," Potter answered. "If the Yankees are getting messages to our niggers, I don't know how they're doing it. I don't know how they're getting word of our shipments, either. That's probably not too hard for them or the niggers, though. They could do it here, or in any one of half a dozen-likely more-railroad dispatch offices, or at the factories in Birmingham."

"I'd like to put you in charge of finding out," Forrest said. "You seem to have more ideas about it than General Cummins does."

Part of Potter craved the extra responsibility. The rest of him had more sense. He said, "Sir, there aren't enough hours in the day for me to give it the attention it ought to have. General Cummins is a good officer. If he can't track down what's going on, odds are nobody can."

"He hasn't done it yet, and he's had his chances," the chief of the General Staff said. "You're right, Potter: he's sound. I know that. But he hasn't got the imagination he needs to be really top-notch."

"If that means you think I do, then I thank you for the compliment," Potter said. "But I'm sure General Cummins has some bright young officers in his shop. Give one of them his head, or more than one. They'll have all the imagination you could want-probably more than you can use."

"With Cummins in charge, they won't get the chance to use it. He'll stifle them," Forrest predicted.

"Sir, there are ways to finesse that." The word made Potter wonder when he'd last played bridge. He loved the game. Like so much of his life, the chance to sit at a table for a few hands had been swallowed up by duty.

"I know there are," Forrest said. "I'd still rather the imagination came from the top. That idea you had for finding spies here-"

"Has come to exactly nothing so far," Potter pointed out.

"It will, though." Forrest sounded more confident than Potter felt. "I don't know when, but it will. Soon, I hope. What I do know is, Cummins wouldn't have had the idea in a million years."

"Somebody over there would have," Potter said.

Nathan Bedford Forrest let out a deeply skeptical grunt. "I don't think so. The President doesn't think so, either."

"Really?" Potter pricked up his ears. "I would have thought I'd have heard that from the President himself if it were so."

"Not lately. He's been at the front a lot." Forrest made a face and dropped his voice. "You didn't hear that from me, dammit."

"Yes, sir." Clarence Potter smiled. Forrest still didn't. He'd let his mouth run freer than it should have, and it worried him. Considering Featherston's temper, it should have worried him, too. Smiling still, Potter went on, "What's he doing up there, playing artilleryman again?"

Now the chief of the General Staff gaped at him. "How the devil did you know that?"

"Well, I didn't know for sure, but I thought it was a pretty good bet," Potter answered. "Remember, the two of us go back to 1915. We go back longer than he does with any of his Freedom Party buddies. We haven't always got along"-now there was an understatement; Potter remembered the weight of the pistol in his pocket when he came up to Richmond for the 1936 Olympics-"but I do have some notion of the way he thinks." And he has a notion of how I think, too, dammit. Otherwise, I wouldn't be in uniform right now.

"All right, then." Forrest didn't sound sure it was all right, but he nodded. "Yeah, he's done some shooting. But you didn't hear that from me, either."

"Hear what?" Potter said blandly. Forrest made a face at him. Potter decided to see if he could squeeze some extra information out of the younger man now that he'd caught him embarrassed: "Sir, are we going to hold Richmond?"

"We'll find out, won't we, General?" Forrest answered. Nodding, Potter dropped it. He could tell he'd got as much as he would get.