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XVIII

The wind that roared down on Provo, Utah, felt as if it had started somewhere in Siberia. Snow blew almost sideways. Armstrong Grimes huddled behind a wall that blocked the worst of it. Most of the house of which the wall had been a part had fallen in on itself. Armstrong turned to Sergeant Stowe and said, "Merry Christmas."

Rex Stowe needed a shave. So did Armstrong, but he couldn't see himself. Snowflakes in the other man's whiskers gave him a grizzled look, old beyond his years. Armstrong sure as hell felt old beyond his. Stowe said, "The fuck of it is, it is a merry Christmas. Goddamn Mormons aren't shooting at us. Far as I'm concerned, that makes it the best day since we got to this shitass place."

"Yeah." Armstrong cupped his hands and lit a cigarette. Arctic wind or not, he got it going first try. He hardly even noticed the blasphemy and obscenity with which Stowe had decked the day of Jesus' birth. He would have done it himself had the other noncom given him a Merry Christmas before he spoke. He said, "Nice to have a smoke without worrying some sniper'll spot the coal and blow my head off."

"Uh-huh." Stowe nodded. "Truce looks to be holding pretty good. If the Mormons want to make like they're holier'n we are 'cause they proposed it, I don't care."

"Me, neither," Armstrong said. "Amen, in fact."

He could even stick his head up over the wall without worrying about anything more than wind and snow. He could, but he didn't. He knew what the rest of Provo looked like: the same sort of lunar landscape as the part the U.S. Army had already clawed away from the rebellious Mormons.

His old man had talked about how the truce in 1914 almost knocked the war into a cocked hat. At Christmas the next year, both sides had fired endless artillery salvos to make sure it didn't happen again. The truce here wasn't anything like that. As soon as the clock hit 12:01 a.m., both sides were going to start banging away at each other again. The only thing either felt for the other was hatred-that and, possibly, a wary respect.

And then that howling wind brought something strange with it: the sound of men singing carols. When Army chaplains talked about the Mormons at all, they insisted the folk who liked to call this place Deseret weren't really Christians. They tried to make the fight sound like a crusade.

Armstrong had never paid much attention to that. He didn't feel like a knight in shining armor. He was filthy and fleabitten and probably lousy again. If they would have put him on a train and shipped him home, he wouldn't even have turned around to wave good-bye. He was here because the Army told him to be here and would shoot him if he bailed out, not because he thought God willed it. God was bound to have better things to do with His time.

But hearing "Silent Night" and then "O Little Town of Bethlehem" gave him pause. "Reminds me of the days when I was a kid and I'd go caroling in the streets," he said.

"You did that?" Stowe said. "I did, too. I guess there aren't a hell of a lot of people who didn't-except for sheenies, I mean."

"Well, yeah, sure," Armstrong said, thinking of Yossel Reisen. "But I didn't think these Mormon bastards had the same songs ordinary people do."

As if to prove him wrong, the men who'd been trying to kill him sang "The Twelve Days of Christmas" and "Deck the Halls" and "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing." They were pretty good. Armstrong wondered if any of them belonged to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. It had come back to life the minute Mormonism turned legal again, even before the Mormon Tabernacle was rebuilt. By now, Armstrong was willing to bet U.S. bombers had knocked the Tabernacle flat again.

How long would it be before the Army fought its way into Salt Lake City for a firsthand look? Armstrong wished he hadn't had that thought. It led to too many others. Chief among them were, How many men will get shot between Provo and Salt Lake? and Will I be one of them? He'd stayed lucky so far. How long could it go on?

Somebody behind Armstrong-a U.S. soldier like him-started singing "Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful." He and Stowe both joined in at the same time. He hadn't sung carols in years, and he'd never had what anybody would call a great voice. He sang out anyhow, for all he was worth. It felt good.

He wondered if the Mormons would try to outshout their enemies. They could do it; they had that howling wind at their backs. Instead, they joined in. Tears stung his eyes and started to freeze his eyelashes together. He rubbed at his eyes with his knuckles. He would have been more embarrassed if the hard-bitten Stowe weren't doing the same thing.

Both sides caroled for half an hour or so. When the singing ended, they gave each other a hand. Armstrong didn't mind clapping for the Mormons. It was Christmas, after all. And he knew it didn't truly mean anything. The war might hold its breath, but it wouldn't go away.

Somebody from the other side of the line called, "You guys sing like you're nice people. Why don't you ever just leave us alone to do what we want?" He didn't even drawl, the way Confederate soldiers did. He sounded like anybody else: he had a vaguely Midwestern accent like half the guys in Armstrong's platoon. That made Mormons deadly dangerous infiltrators. It also made their uprising harder for Armstrong to fathom. They seemed like people no different from anybody else. They seemed like that-but they weren't.

"Why don't you stay here in the USA where you belong?" someone on the U.S. side yelled back.

That brought angry shouts from the Mormons-so angry that Armstrong looked to make sure he could grab his Springfield in a hurry. The truce felt on the edge of falling apart. He also found out a few things he hadn't known before. Nobody'd ever told him the Mormons had come to Utah before the First Mexican War exactly because they'd wanted to escape the USA even back then, only to find themselves under the Stars and Stripes again whether they wanted to be or not.

"Jesus," Stowe said: an appropriate comment on the day. Less appropriately, he went on, "These assholes have wanted to secede even longer than the goddamn Confederates."

"Yeah, well, how can they?" Armstrong asked. "They're right here in the middle of us. You can't make a country like that. Besides, they're a bunch of perverts. They ought to straighten out and fly right."

"Tell me about it," Stowe replied with a filthy leer. But then, as the shouting went back and forth between the lines, he added, "I wish to God they weren't shooting at us. Then we could make a couple of Mormon divisions and throw 'em at Featherston's fuckers. That would use 'em up in a hurry." He chuckled cynically.

"Maybe not. They might just mutiny and go over to the CSA," Armstrong said.

Stowe grunted. "You're right, dammit. They might. Plain as the nose on your face the Confederates are giving 'em as much help as they can."

In the end, nobody on either side started shooting in spite of the curses that flew back and forth. It stayed Christmas to that extent, anyhow. And Armstrong went back to the field kitchen without worrying about Mormon snipers. The cooks served ham and sweet potatoes and something that was alleged to be fruitcake but looked as if it came from a latrine. It did taste all right, and it gave the soldiers the chance to razz the cooks. They always liked that.

Once they returned to their positions at the front line, Stowe pulled a flask from his jacket pocket. He brought it to his mouth, then passed it to Armstrong. "Here. Have a knock of this."

"Thanks." Armstrong swigged, trying not to be too greedy. Brandy ran down his throat, smooth as a pretty girl's kiss. "Where'd you come up with this shit? Damn Mormons aren't supposed to have any."

"Musta been a gentile's house," Stowe said.

"Hope the Mormons didn't poison it and leave it for us," Armstrong remarked.

Stowe gave him the finger. "There's a hell of a thing to go and say. I've had hooch poison me a time or three, but I haven't got enough in here for that."

Armstrong did his best to look worldly-wise. He'd done some drinking in the Army, but hardly any before. His folks would take a drink every now and then, but they didn't make a big thing out of it. His father would have walloped the tar out of him if he ever came home smashed. As for the swig of brandy the sergeant had given him, it sent a little warmth out from his stomach, but otherwise left him unpoisoned.

He rolled himself in a down-filled quilt. That was a bit of his own war booty, and a hell of a lot warmer than an Army-issue wool blanket. He used the folded-up blanket for a pillow. As he fell asleep, he wondered when he'd last lain in a real bed. It had been a while.

Some time in the middle of the night, he woke up. There were occasional flurries of gunfire, nothing to get excited about. If he'd let stuff like this bother him, he wouldn't have been able to sleep at all near the front. Only after he'd wiggled around for a little while did he think, Oh. It must be after midnight. Then he went back to sleep. If the shooting picked up, he knew he'd wake again.

What happened instead was that Sergeant Stowe shook him awake. The sun still hadn't come up, but the sky behind the mountains to the east was beginning to go gray. "Welcome back to the war," Stowe said.

"Screw the war." Armstrong yawned. "Screw you, too."

"I don't want you. I want a blonde with big tits," Stowe said. "Only trouble is, the gals like that carry rifles around here. They'd sooner blow my brains out than blow me."

As it got lighter, bombers came overhead and started pounding the parts of Provo the Mormons still held. The bombers were not only outmoded but flying above the clouds. Thanks to both those things, they weren't the most accurate bombing platforms God or U.S. factories had ever made. Some of the bombs came down on the U.S. side of the line.

The handful of Mormon antiaircraft guns banged away at the bombers overhead. Firing blind, they didn't have much hope of hitting them. All the same, Armstrong-who'd got dirt down the back of his neck from a near miss by his own side-snarled, "I hope they shoot those fuckers down."

"Bet your ass," Stowe said. "Goddamn bombers can't hit the broad side of a barn."

"Oh, I don't know about that," Armstrong said. "If they're aiming at us, they're pretty good shots."

"Ha! That'd be funny if only it was funny, you know what I mean?"

"Hell, yes," Armstrong said. "If I ever run into one of those flyboys, I hope I come as close to killing him as he just came to killing me."

"Yeah! That's good!" Stowe said. "If I run into one of 'em, I think I would kill him. It's what he was trying to do to me. Only difference is, I'm good at what I do, and those bastards aren't."

Mortar bombs came whispering down on U.S. trenches and foxholes. The Mormons often tried to repay whatever the USA did to them. After the ordnance the bombers had expended on their own men, the mortar rounds hardly seemed worth getting excited about. Again, Armstrong wondered how long he would take to get out of Utah and if he could somehow do it alive and in one piece.

As a lieutenant, junior grade, Sam Carsten had worn a thick gold stripe and a thin one on his jacket cuffs for a long time. A lieutenant wore two full stripes. Carsten didn't give a damn about the promotion. Some things were too dearly bought. He would rather have been a j.g. aboard the Remembrance than a lieutenant waiting for new orders at Pearl Harbor and contemplating a gloomy New Year.

Too many men were gone. He didn't know what had happened to Lieutenant Commander Pottinger. All he knew was that nobody'd fished the chief of the damage-control party out of the Pacific. Eyechart Szczerbiakowicz hadn't made it back to Oahu, either. Somebody had said the sailor was wounded going into the drink and hadn't been able to stay afloat. And Captain Stein, an officer of the old school, had gone down with the Remembrance. Word was that he'd got a Medal of Honor for it. Much good the decoration did him.

Gloomily, Sam trudged over to the officers' club. He intended to see 1942 in smashed. He'd feel like grim death when he sobered up tomorrow morning, but he didn't care. He was too sorrowful to face the world sober.

Despite the loss of Midway-and of the only U.S. airplane carrier in the Pacific-a lot of officers were living it up. Some of them had wives along, others girlfriends. The band played a bouncy tune that mimicked Confederate rhythms without being too blatant about it.

Here and there, though, sat other gloomy men with slumped shoulders, intent on the serious business of getting drunk. At the bar, one of them waved to Sam. Dan Cressy had four stripes on his sleeves these days. They'd promoted him to captain. By all the signs, that delighted him no more than Sam liked his promotion.

"Happy New Year, Carsten." Yes, if Cressy was happy, Sam wouldn't have wanted to see him sad.

Carsten sat down by the Remembrance's exec and ordered a shot over ice. Even before the drink got there, he said, "It's a bastard, sir."

They made an odd pair: the aging lieutenant and the young, promising captain. They'd been through a lot together, though. Cressy said, "It's a bastard and a half, is what it is." He emptied his glass and signaled for a refill. "I'm ahead of you."

"Oh, that's all right," Sam answered. "I expect I can catch up." He got the shot, poured it down, and waved for another.

Both new drinks arrived at the same time. Cressy stared moodily into his. "This isn't how I wanted to get promoted, God damn it." He bit the words off one by one.

"No, sir. Me, neither," Sam said.

"I tried to get him to come away." Cressy was talking more to himself than to Sam. "I tried. I said the Navy needed him. I said the country needed him. I said… Well, it doesn't matter what I said. He looked at me and he told me,, 'This is my ship, and she's sinking. Get off her, Commander. Good-bye and good luck." So I got off her. What else could I do?"

"Nothing I can see. You got me off her the same way," Sam said.

"You." Commander-no, Captain-Cressy seemed to come back to himself, at least a little. He managed a smile of sorts for Sam. "I'd've kicked myself for the rest of my days if anything had happened to you."

That made Sam blink even as he knocked back his shot and waved for another reload. "Me?" His voice squeaked in surprise. He wondered when he'd last squeaked like that. Probably not since he'd joined the Navy, which was a hell of a long time ago now. "Nothing special about me, sir. Just a mustang who's long in the tooth."

With whiskey-fueled precision, Cressy started ticking off points on his fingers. "Item: there aren't that many mustangs to begin with. Coming up through the hawse hole's never been easy. Item: most of the mustangs I've known don't make very good officers. That doesn't mean they're not good men. They are, just about every one of them. And they have fine records as ratings, or they wouldn't have made officer's grade in the first place. But most of 'em don't have the imagination, the, the breadth, to make good officers. You're different."

"Thank you kindly. I don't know that it's true, but thank you. I try to do the best work I can, that's all."

The vehemence with which Captain Cressy shook his head spoke of how much he'd put away. "No. Any mustang, near enough, will do his particular job pretty well. Most of them won't care about anything outside their assignment, though. You aren't like that. How many times did you get chased out of the wireless shack?"

"Oh, maybe a few, sir," Sam allowed. "I like to know what's going on."

"That's what I'm saying," Cressy told him. "And you would always come up with something interesting in the officers' wardroom-always. You don't just want to know what's going on. You think about it, too, and you think straight."

Sam only shrugged. Praise made him uncomfortable. "Sir, you know ten times as much as I do."

"More, yes, but not ten times. How much schooling did you have before you enlisted?"

"Eighth grade, sir. About what you'd expect."

"Yes, about what I'd expect. On the other hand, I've got one of these." Cressy tapped his Annapolis class ring with the forefinger of his other hand. "If you had one of these, you'd hold flag rank now. You've… picked up your learning other ways, and that's a slower, harder business. I was talking about breadth a little while ago. You can make officer's rank with an eighth-grade education, but if you haven't got something more than that on the ball you won't go anywhere even if you do. That's what sets you apart from most mustangs. You've got that extra something."

"Fat lot of good it did me," Sam said bitterly. "I could know everything there was to know and I wouldn't've been able to douse that fire aft on the Remembrance."

"Some things are bigger than you are, that's all," Cressy said. "You weren't the only one trying, you know."

"But I was in charge, dammit," Carsten said. "Well, Lieutenant Commander Pottinger was, God rest his soul, but I was the fellow with a hose in my hand."

"Some things are bigger than you are," Cressy repeated. "That fire was bigger than a man with a hose."

Sam wanted to argue with him. However much he wanted to, he knew he couldn't. The Remembrance had taken too many hits for any damage control to help. He changed the subject: "You'll have your own command now, sir. A cruiser at least-maybe a battleship."

"Not the way I wanted to get it," Cressy said once more. "And if I do go into business for myself, I'd sooner do it in another flattop. Trouble is, we haven't got any that are short a skipper, and we won't till they launch the ones that are building. And the carriers have the same trouble everything else has-getting stuff and people from A to B when A is west of Ohio and B is east or the other way round."

"What the hell can we do about that, sir?" Sam asked.

"Fight. Keep fighting. Not give up no matter what," Cressy answered. "The Japs can't hope to lick us. Oh, if we screw up bad enough, they may drive us out of the Sandwich Islands"-he grimaced at the thought-"but even if they do, they won't land three divisions south of Los Angeles. Britain and France can't lick us-same argument on the East Coast. And I don't see how the Confederates can lick us, either. They can hurt us. But I think we're too big and too strong for them to knock us flat and hold us down. We're the only people who can lick us. If we give up, if we lay down, we're in trouble. As long as we don't, we'll stay on our feet longer than anybody who's in there slugging with us."

Sam waved to the barkeep for another shot. Noticing Cressy's glass was also empty, he pointed to it and held up two fingers. The bartender nodded. As the man poured the drinks, Sam said, "I hope you're right, sir."

Cressy gave him a sad, sweet smile he never would have shown sober. "Hell, Carsten, so do I." He waited till the bartender brought the fresh drinks, then lifted his glass in salute. "And here's to you. Since they fished you out of the Pacific, where do you want to go from here?"

"I haven't really worried about it all that much, sir," Sam answered. "I'll go wherever they send me. If they want to leave me in damage control, well, I'll do that. I don't like it a whole lot, but I'm good at it by now. If they put me back in gunnery, that'd be better. Or if they finally give me something to do with airplanes, I'd like that the most. It's why I transferred over to the Remembrance in the first place, back when I was still a petty officer."

"If I were running the Bureau of Personnel, that's not what I'd do with you," Captain Cressy said.

"Sir?" A polite question was always safe.

"If it were up to me, I'd give you a ship," Cressy said, which made Sam want to jam a finger in his ear to make sure he'd heard right. The other officer went on, "I would. I'd give you a destroyer or a minelayer or a minesweeper. You could handle it, and I think you'd do a first-rate job."

"Th-Thank you, sir," Sam stammered. "I'm gladder than hell you think so." He wasn't nearly so sure he thought so himself, or that he wanted so much responsibility. But if he didn't, why had he tried to become an officer in the first place?

This time, Captain Cressy's smile was knowing. "Don't pop a gasket worrying about it, because the odds are long. BuPers doesn't know you the way I do. But they may stick you in a destroyer as exec under a two-and-a-half striper. Or they may give you something little-a sub chaser, say-and let you show what you can do with that."

"Well," Sam said wonderingly, and then again: "Well." Command hadn't occurred to him. Neither had serving as exec. He raised his glass in a salute of his own. "If they do give me the number-two slot somewhere, sir, the man I'll try to imitate is you."

"That's a real compliment," Cressy said. "I know who my models are. I suppose a few people in the Navy have picked up a pointer or two from me." He was sandbagging, and doubtless knew it. He pointed at Sam. "You'll have to do it your own way in the end, though, because you're you, not me. You've got years on me, and you've got all that experience as a rating. Use it. It'll do you good."

"Me? Command?" Sam didn't squeak this time, but he still did sound wondering, even to himself. He wondered if he could swing it. He'd understudied poor dead Pottinger in the damage-control party for years. The men had obeyed him about as well as they had the lieutenant commander. He'd always figured he could run the party if something ever happened to Pottinger. Now something damn well had, but it had happened to the Remembrance, too.

"You can do the job, Carsten. You can get the men to do what they're supposed to do, too," Cressy said. "You think I would say that if I didn't mean it?" He eyed Sam with owlish, booze-fueled intensity.

"Command," Sam said once more. He was feeling the whiskey, too. "Well, it's up to BuPers, not me." But now he couldn't help wondering what sort of orders the clerks back in Philadelphia would cut for him.

Sometimes January south of the Potomac was almost as bad as January up in Ontario. Sometimes, though, January here could feel like April up there. A high up close to fifty? A low above freezing? That hardly seemed like winter at all to Jonathan Moss.

He remembered flying in the Canadian winter during the Great War. More to the point, he remembered not flying most of the time. Bad weather-either snow or just low clouds-had kept fighters on the ground more often than not. Things weren't so bad here.

And the U.S. soldiers on the ground needed all the help they could get. They were trying to gain footholds on the south bank of the Rapidan, and not having a whole lot of luck. The only place where they'd gained any lodgement at all was in some truly miserable second-growth country that was marked on the map as the Wilderness. Having flown over it, Jonathan could see how it had got the name. The only reason the Confederates hadn't thrown the Army back into the river there was that they had as much trouble bringing men up to defend as the U.S. forces did in expanding their little bridgehead.

Moss' squadron listened in a tent as he briefed them. He whacked a large-scale map with a wooden pointer. "This is a ground-attack mission, gentlemen," he said. "We're going to shoot up the Confederates. Then we'll come home, gas up, get reloaded, and go back and do it again. We'll keep on doing it till they break. Have you got that? Any questions?"

Nobody said anything. Moss had a question of his own: what happens if we keep hammering and they don't break? He'd seen that more times than he could count in the last war. What happened was that a lot of men ended up dead and maimed. But he was the only Great War veteran here. The pilots he led were young and eager. He envied them. He was neither.

Eager or not, he was good at what he did. He wouldn't have lived through one war and the first six months of another if he hadn't been. And, eager or not, he was reasonably confident he'd come back to this airstrip once he and his men had worked over the Confederate positions. He'd made a lot of flights. What was one more?

The groundcrew men said his Wright was in fine fettle. He ran down the checklist himself just the same. They weren't going up there. He damn well was. Everything did seem all right. It almost always did. The day he didn't double-check, though, was bound to be the day when something went wrong.

Engine roaring, the fighter jounced along the runway and sprang into the air. Moss climbed quickly. He circled above the field, waiting for the men he led to join him. "Ready?" he called on the wireless.

"Ready!" The word dinned in his earphones.

"Then let's go." He flew south. A few puffs of smoke from bursting antiaircraft shells sprouted around the squadron. What dinned in Jonathan's earphones then were curses. He added a few of his own, or more than a few. They were still in U.S.-held territory, which meant their own side was doing its best to shoot them down. That its best wasn't quite good enough failed to reassure him.

Before long, they left the overenthusiastic gunners behind. From the air, the battlefield looked much more like those from the Great War than the Ohio ones had. Because the front had moved slowly here, things on both sides of it had been pounded and cratered in a way they hadn't farther west. The bombed-out landscape took Jonathan back half a lifetime across the years.

There was the Rappahannock. Hardly the blink of an eye later, there was the Rapidan, and the U.S. toehold on the far bank. The Wilderness had surely looked like what it was even before war came to it. Bombs and artillery and entrenchments did nothing to improve it.

Moss didn't want to shoot up his own side, even if his own side hadn't been shy about shooting at him. Green flares went up from the ground to mark U.S. positions. Anything beyond them was fair game. He swooped low over the battlefield, shooting up trenches and trucks and anything that caught his eye. A column of men in butternut tramping up a road dissolved like maple sugar in water under machine-gun fire.

Whoops of glee filled Moss' earphones. He let out shouts when he was shooting things up, too. It was fine sport-none finer-if you didn't think about the havoc you were wreaking on the ground. Watching trucks go up in flames, watching ant-sized men scatter in all directions, was like being inside an adventure film.

This had a drawback adventure films didn't: people shot back at you here. Confederate antiaircraft gunners and machine gunners and riflemen filled the air with lead. Strafing runs were more dangerous than bomber escort because of all the small-arms fire that couldn't touch you at altitude. Moss never worried about it very much. It was just something that came with the mission.

He was clawing his way up off the deck to go around for another pass when his engine suddenly quit. Smoke and steam gushed from it. Oil streamed back and smeared his windshield. A chunk of metal from the cowling slammed off the bulletproof glass, too.

"Shit," he said, and then something stronger. He gave the altimeter a quick glance-two thousand feet. If he didn't get out now, he never would. He cranked back the canopy, stood up in his seat, and bailed out.

He got away from the stricken fighter without smashing against the tail-always an escaping pilot's first worry. As soon as he was free, he yanked the ripcord. He didn't have a lot of time to waste, not down that low. The parachute opened with a loud whump! Moss' vision went red for a few seconds, then slowly cleared.

Another, smaller, whump! was a bullet going through the silk canopy above his head. He was a target hanging up here in the sky. If the Confederates on the ground wanted to shoot him, they could. They could shoot him by accident, too. Till he got down, he couldn't do anything about anything.

A tall column of black, greasy smoke rising from the ground not too far away had to be the Wright's funeral pyre. He shuddered. If the canopy had jammed, it would have been his funeral pyre, too.

Here came the ground. He steered away from a stand of trees and towards a clearing. Then he wondered if he'd made a mistake, because soldiers in butternut came out of the woods. No help for it now. He bent his knees, bracing for the landing. He twisted an ankle, but that was all.

As he struggled to get out of the parachute harness, the soldiers ran up to him. He looked down the barrels of several automatic rifles and submachine guns. "Surrender!" three men yelled at the same time.

"Well, what the hell else am I going to do?" Moss asked irritably. "There!" He shed the harness. He knew of a man who'd had to cut his way free, and had cut off the tip of his thumb without even noticing till later.

One of the Confederates had a single bar on either side of his collar: a second lieutenant. "Can you walk, Yankee?" he asked.

"Let's see." Gingerly, Moss got to his feet and put weight on that ankle. "Kind of."

"Pull his teeth, somebody," the lieutenant said. A corporal plucked the.45 automatic from Moss' belt. The downed fighter pilot looked at it as if it belonged to somebody else-which it did, now. He'd been about as likely to yank it out and start shooting as to sprout wings and fly away without his airplane. Of course, the Confederates didn't know that. To them, if not to himself, he was still a dangerous character.

They also relieved him of his wristwatch. That was a different story. He let out a squawk: "My wife gave me that watch." It was one of the last things he had by which to remember Laura.

The lieutenant stuck it in his pocket. "And so?" he asked coolly. Moss wondered whether a sob story would do him any good. He didn't wonder for more than about three seconds, though. They didn't have to take prisoners, no matter what the Geneva Convention said. Not every fighting man who fell into enemy hands ended up in a POW camp. If they shot him now, who'd know? Who'd care? Nobody and nobody, respectively. When Moss kept his mouth shut, the lieutenant nodded and said, "I reckoned you were a smart fellow. Now get moving."

He got moving. He couldn't go very fast, but they didn't push him. As long as they were herding him along, they were doing something clearly line-of-duty and just as clearly not very hard. That came close to a soldier's ideal. One of them even cut a branch off a pine and trimmed it with his bayonet to make Moss a walking stick. He took it gratefully. It helped.

They'd spread camouflage netting and branches over their tents. That must have worked; they didn't seem to have been shot up. The lieutenant took Moss into a tent where a man in his thirties with three bars on each side of his collar-a captain-sat behind a folding table doing paperwork. "Captured the damnyankee flier we heard going down," the lieutenant said proudly.

"Good work." By the casual way the captain said it, this sort of thing happened every day, which was bullshit of the purest ray serene. The captain looked at Moss and said, "For you, the war is over."

How many bad films about the Great War had he seen, to come out with a line like that? Moss almost laughed in his face. But it wasn't really a laughing matter, not when he could still suffer an unfortunate accident-and when the captain was right. "Looks that way to me, too," Moss said.

The captain got down to business. "Give me your particulars."

"Jonathan Moss. Major, U.S. Army." He rattled off his pay number. He knew it as well as he knew his name.

"What was your mission?" the Confederate officer asked.

"I've told you everything the laws of war say I have to," Moss answered, and waited to see what happened next. If the captain felt like giving him the third degree… he couldn't do a whole hell of a lot about it.

But the man just said, "Well, we can't keep you here. We don't have the setup to hold prisoners. Jenkins!"

"Yes, sir!" the lieutenant said.

"Take him into Spotsylvania. They'll have a jail there. He won't get out till they can take him down to the Carolinas or Georgia or one of those places where they've got themselves POW camps."

"Yes, sir," the lieutenant repeated. Into Spotsylvania Moss went. Hell of a name for a town, he thought, but that was one more thing he kept quiet about. The auto was of Confederate make, but looked and performed like one built in the USA. Two soldiers with submachine guns sitting behind Moss discouraged any thoughts of adventure.

The jail was a squat red-brick building. The sheriff considerately gave Moss a cell as far away from the drunk tank as he could. It had a cot and a chamber pot and a pitcher and cup and basin. The water was cool, not cold. Moss drank it anyway. The bars all looked very solid. He rattled them. They were. He sighed and lay down on the cot. For you, the war is over. And so it was.

Brigadier General Abner Dowling was not a happy man. For Dowling, that made anything but a man-bites-dog headline. What with long service under George Armstrong Custer, even longer service in hate-filled Utah, and brief service trying to hold back the Confederate thrust into Ohio, he hadn't had a lot to be happy about. When some of your fonder memories were of a Salt Lake City sporting house, you hadn't lived life for the fun of it.

He wasn't enjoying himself much here in Virginia, either. His corps had borne the brunt of the Confederate flank attack. They'd contained it, but they'd been badly battered in the process. The counterattack against the right and the coming of winter had slowed the U.S. advance-intended to be as quick and ferocious as the Confederate drive that had opened the fighting-to a crawl right out of 1915.

And now Daniel MacArthur had a new brainstorm. As Dowling's driver took him over the icy roads to MacArthur's headquarters in Warrenton, he wondered what the army commander had come up with this time. MacArthur's last inspiration had led to this bloody stalemate. Dowling was more than a little surprised to see the flamboyant officer get a second chance. He wondered what MacArthur would do with it.

When fighters roared by overhead, he wondered if he would live to find out. The Confederates still came over and harried road traffic in U.S.-held territory, just as U.S. airplanes shot up motorcars farther south. But either these were U.S. fighters or the Confederates didn't think the middle-aged Buick worth wasting ammunition on, for he came through unscathed.

Warrenton was nothing special. It had gone from Virginia to West Virginia, from the CSA to the USA, after the Great War, and had never got over it. YANKEES GO HOME! graffiti, others saying FREEDOM!, and whitewashed patches covering up more such love notes scarred the walls. Dowling saw no U.S. soldiers by themselves. Everybody always had at least one buddy along, which spoke volumes about how much the locals thought of themselves as U.S. citizens.

Daniel MacArthur had appropriated the fanciest house in town for his headquarters. That struck Dowling as utterly in character. If MacArthur had made one more Warrentonian turn scarlet about the United States and everything they stood for… Dowling, frankly, wasn't going to give a damn.

The neoclassical columned portico made him feel as if he were walking into a government building in Philadelphia or Washington. The only difference was, the architect here had shown better taste and more restraint than builders in the USA's capitals were in the habit of doing.

"Good afternoon, General." MacArthur greeted him in the foyer.

It was getting on toward evening, but Dowling didn't argue. "Good afternoon, sir." He saluted. Grandly, MacArthur returned the courtesy. His long, lean toothpick of a body was made for the grand, arrogant gesture. Built more along the lines of a refrigerator, Dowling had to make do with competence. He asked, "What have you got in mind, sir? Some way to punch through the Wilderness?" He didn't think any such way existed. His superior was all too likely to own a different opinion. Which of them turned out to be right might prove a different question, but MacArthur had more stars on his shoulder straps than Dowling.

The cigarette in MacArthur's long, fancy holder quivered. Excitement? Disdain? Who could tell? "Come with me to the map room," the U.S. general commanding said. You couldn't fight a war without maps. Only MacArthur would make it sound as if he never looked at them outside of this one room.

He led Dowling to a chamber that was indeed full of maps. To Dowling's surprise, he pointed to a large-scale one that showed all over Virginia and the surrounding states, both U.S. and C.S. "I'm sorry, sir, but I can't make it out from this alone," Dowling said.

"No?" By MacArthur's tone, he'd just proved himself a moron. "What I aim to do, General, is force the Confederates to divide their forces by making a surprise landing at the mouth of the James and advancing on Richmond along the river." He struck a pose, plainly waiting for Dowling to acclaim his genius.

Whatever else you could say about him, he didn't think small. But there were other things to say. Dowling didn't scream, Are you out of your goddamn mind, sir? He was proud of himself because he didn't. It showed commendable restraint on his part-that was how he saw it, anyway.

"Didn't General McClellan try that same move during the War of Secession?" he inquired, hoping to lead MacArthur back to reality by easy stages.

"He did indeed," MacArthur said. "But he didn't move fast enough. The only thing about McClellan that might have moved fast enough was his bowels."

Dowling fought back a startled giggle. From everything he'd read about McClellan, that was gospel truth. Even so, he said, "But you have to worry about things he didn't-the Confederates' Navy and their bombers, for instance. If you do land a force, can you supply it?"

"By God, I can. By God, I will." MacArthur stuck out his granite chin, as if to say he needed nothing but determination.

It wasn't that simple, as Dowling knew too well. "Sir, they'll have artillery that can reach our rear, too," he said. "General McClellan didn't have to worry about that kind of thing, either."

Outside the map room, light drained from the sky. MacArthur looked at him as if he'd just crawled out, all pallid and moist, from under a flat rock. "I had hoped you would show confidence in the fighting ability of the American soldier, General," he said stiffly.

"Sir, I do. I'm more confident of that than of just about anything else in the world," Dowling answered. "But I also think we shouldn't have to depend on his fighting ability by itself. I think he ought to go into battle with a plan that gives him the best chance to win without getting slaughtered."

Now Daniel MacArthur looked as if he wanted to step on what had crawled out from under the flat rock. "Are you saying my plan does not meet that criterion? I must tell you, I beg to differ." He didn't beg to differ; he demanded.

Instead of answering directly, Dowling asked, "What does the General Staff think of your scheme?"

MacArthur snapped his fingers with contempt a Shakespearean actor might have envied. "That for the General Staff!" he said. "If they fart, they'll blow their brains out."

Custer would have agreed with that, and would have laughed himself into a coughing fit when he heard it. Dowling persisted: "Have you submitted this plan to them?"

"I don't need to," MacArthur said. "I command in the Virginia theater."

"Well, yes, sir. Of course, sir." Dowling might have been trying to soothe a dangerous lunatic. As far as he was concerned, that was exactly what he was doing. He went on, "But if you're going to land troops at the mouth of the James, you'll need some help from the Navy, you know."

"Oh, I have that." MacArthur waved away such trivial concerns. "Rear Admiral Halsey, the commander of the Southern Shore Naval District, is confident he can give me everything I need along those lines."

"Is he?" Dowling said tonelessly. He hadn't known the Navy also had a wild man running around loose. He supposed it was fate-probably a malign fate-that let this other officer link up with MacArthur. "Does the Navy Department have any idea what he's up to?"

"General Dowling, your continual carping questions grow tiresome in the extreme," MacArthur said. "I thought you would be eager to come to grips with the enemy in some new place. I see I was unduly optimistic."

"I would have been more eager to come to grips with him here in northern Virginia if the attack hadn't been delayed so long," Dowling said.

Daniel MacArthur's face went a dusky, blotchy red. "Good evening," he choked out.

"Good evening, sir." Dowling saluted again and left MacArthur's sanctum sanctorum. If the other man wanted to relieve him, Dowling wouldn't lose any sleep over it. Even going back to Philadelphia might be a relief after serving under such a prima donna. I've done this before. I don't need to do it again, Dowling thought.

His driver was smoking a cigarette when he got out to the motorcar. When the man said, "Where to now, sir?" he had whiskey as well as smoke on his breath. Either he carried a flask or he'd made a friend while waiting for Dowling to emerge.

"Back to my headquarters," Dowling said, and then, "Do you want me to do the driving?"

"Oh, no, sir. I'm fine," the driver assured him, unabashed. "I just had a nip. I didn't get smashed or anything."

"All right." Dowling waited to see if it was. It seemed to be. The driver shifted gears smoothly, didn't speed, and didn't wander all over the road. Considering that the taped-over headlamps didn't reach much farther than a man could spit, not speeding was an especially good idea.

Dowling kept a hand on his sidearm all the way back. Confederate bushwhackers sometimes took potshots at passing autos. He didn't intend to go down without shooting back. What he intended to do and what he got a chance to do might prove two different things. He understood that, even if he didn't want to think about it.

He wondered whether Daniel MacArthur had ever grasped the difference between intention and reality. All the signs said he hadn't, any more than George Custer had before him. Once, Custer had proved spectacularly right. By substituting his own view of what barrels could do for War Department doctrine, he'd gone a long way toward winning the Great War for the USA. Before that, though, how many soldiers in green-gray had he slaughtered in his headlong attacks on entrenched Confederate positions? Tens of thousands, surely.

Maybe MacArthur's plan for a landing at the mouth of the James and a drive on Richmond from the southeast was a brilliant move that would win the war. Then again, maybe it wasn't. It hadn't been for McClellan, eighty years ago now. MacArthur was without a doubt a better general than McClellan had been. Of course, saying that was like saying something smelled better than a skunk. It might be true, but how much did it tell you?

Once Dowling had got back, he went to his code book for the five-letter groups that let him ask Colonel John Abell, WHAT IS GENERAL STAFF'S VIEW OF PROPOSED LANDING? He handled that personally; he didn't want even his signals officer knowing anything about it. MacArthur would probably guess where the leak came from. Too bad, Dowling thought.

The answer, also coded, came back inside half an hour. That didn't surprise Dowling. Colonel Abell damn near lived at his desk. Dowling also did his own decoding. WHAT PROPOSED LANDING? Abell asked.

"Ha!" Dowling said, and found the groups for a new message: SUGGEST YOU INQUIRE COMMANDING GENERAL THIS THEATER.

If the General Staff decided the plan was brilliant, they'd let MacArthur go ahead. So Dowling told himself, anyhow. But he also told himself somebody other than the scheme's originator ought to look at it before it went forward.

He didn't hear from Colonel Abell again. He also didn't receive a detonation from Daniel MacArthur. Abell knew when to be subtle, then. MacArthur pulled no troops from Dowling's command to go into a landing force. That didn't leave Dowling downhearted, not at all. Sometimes what didn't happen was as important as what did.

In spite of everything, reports from Philadelphia did get back to Richmond. They took a while, but they got here. Clarence Potter, unlike a lot of people in the Confederate government and military these days, was a patient man. Sooner or later, he expected he would find out what he needed to know.

One of the things he'd grown interested in was how reports got from Richmond to Philadelphia, to whatever opposite numbers he had there. A clerk in the U.S. War Department had sent by a roundabout route a U.S. report that… quoted Potter, as a matter of fact.

I believe the situation with regard to the Negroes in Mississippi is hectic, and our response to it must be dynamic. Seeing his own words come back was interesting-and exciting, too. He'd written several versions of that report. In another, he called the situation distressing and the needed response ferocious; in yet another, the keywords were alarming and merciless; and so on. He had a list of where the report with each set of keywords had been distributed. He kept that list in his wallet. No one but him could possibly get at it.

When he took out the list, he checked to see where the relevant words were hectic and dynamic. Then, whistling to himself, he went to Lieutenant General Forrest's office. He had to cool his heels in an anteroom for half an hour before he could see the chief of the Confederate General Staff. By the glum expressions on the faces of the two major generals who emerged from Forrest's inner office, they would have been glad to let him go before them.

"Good morning, General," Nathan Bedford Forrest III said when Potter came in at last. "Sometimes you have to take people out to the woodshed. It's not a hell of a lot of fun, but it's part of the job."

"Yes, sir. You're right on both counts." Potter closed the door behind him and lowered his voice: "You're right on both counts, and you've got a Yankee spy somewhere in the Operations and Training Section."

"Son of a bitch," Forrest said. "Son of a bitch! So your cute little scheme there paid off, did it?"

"Yes, sir." Clarence Potter nodded in somber satisfaction. "When I drafted that report on the guerrilla situation in Mississippi, I varied the words in some of the most important sentences. Each version went to a different section here in the War Department and in the State Department. If a spy sent it north and one of our people in the USA got it back to me, I'd know where it came from. I've had to wait longer than I wanted to, but that's part of the game."

"Operations and Training, eh?" A savage gleam came into Forrest's eyes. His great-grandfather had probably worn that same expression just before he drew his saber and charged some luckless damnyankee cavalryman. "You have any idea who the snake in the grass is?"

"No, sir," Potter answered. "I can't even prove he's the only spy in the War Department. But I know he's there, and I can think of a couple of different ways to get after him."

"I'm all ears," Forrest said.

"One would be to do the same thing I did this time: make several versions of a report, one for each subsection of O and T. The problem with that is, getting results back from the USA is slow and uncertain," Potter said. "The other one is the usual-seeing who has a grudge, seeing who's spending more money than his salary accounts for, seeing who all had access to the report, and on and on. You'll have plenty of people who can do that for you; you don't need me to give them lessons."

"Let's try both approaches," Nathan Bedford Forrest III said after only the barest pause for thought. "You fix up another report-hell, make it on the organization and training of spies. They'll sit up and take notice of that. We'll use it to winnow out suspects, or we'll try to, anyway. And we'll do the usual things, too. We don't want to miss a trick here."

Potter nodded. "All right, sir. I'll take care of it. I wonder how much this bastard has given the USA without our ever noticing it."

"When we catch him, we'll squeeze him like an orange," the chief of the General Staff promised. "Oh, yes. I have plenty of people who can take care of that for me, too."

"No doubt, sir." Now Potter did his best to hide his distaste. Intelligence work wasn't always about friendly persuasion. Potter didn't shrink from straightforward brutality, but he didn't relish it, either. Some people did. They usually made better Freedom Party stalwarts and other sorts of strongarm men than they did spies-usually, but not always.

"You did a terrific job here, Potter," Forrest said. "Your country won't forget."

"This is just a start. When we catch this son of a bitch, then I've done something," Potter said.

"Well, at least we're looking in the right place now-or one of the right places." Forrest looked harried. "Jesus Christ! We're liable to be ass-deep in these stinking Yankees."

"Every one we ferret out is one we don't have to worry about later." Potter didn't say that one captured spy would lead to others. It was possible, but not likely. If the Yankees had the brains God gave a blue crab, they'd have each spy sending what he found to someone he never saw, didn't know, and would have a hard time betraying. Jack Smith wouldn't know that Joe Doakes three desks over was also selling out his country. They could eat lunch together every day for twenty years without finding out about each other. He'd organized things in Philadelphia and Washington that way. His counterparts in green-gray would do the same thing.

"You fix up some fresh bait." Nathan Bedford Forrest III might have been on a fishing trip. And so he was-but he hoped to fry up a nastier catch than crappie or bluegill. "We'll take it from there."

Potter recognized dismissal when he heard it. He got to his feet and saluted. "Yes, sir." Out he went, coldly pleased with himself. He wished he could have talked with Anne Colleton about what he'd done. She would have appreciated it. She might have thought of it herself-she'd been nobody's fool. If she hadn't gone down to Charleston the day the Yankee carrier raided…

He shrugged. Bad luck came to everybody. You had to look at it that way, or else the voices that came to you in the wee small hours of bad nights started showing up at all hours every day. You weren't good for anything then, to yourself or to anybody else. Bury your dead, drink a toast to them now and again, and move on. As long as you kept moving, you made a hard target.

They'd get you anyway, of course. Odds were, though, they'd take longer.

He sat down at his desk. It wasn't as if he had nothing to do. He'd pile those bait reports on top of everything else. No rest for the weary, he thought. Or was it for the wicked? He never could remember. And what difference did it make? It fit either way.

He swore when the telephone rang. There went a perfectly good train of thought. He wondered if he'd be able to find it again. The telephone went on ringing. He picked it up. "Clarence Potter here." Anybody who didn't know he was in Intelligence had no business calling on this line.

"Hello, Potter, you sly son of a bitch. General Forrest tells me you really are as smart as you think you are."

"Thank you, Mr. President-I suppose." Potter wasn't inclined to let anyone praise more faintly than he did.

Neither was Jake Featherston. Laughing, he said, "You're welcome-I reckon." His good humor never lasted long. He went on, "That was a good piece of work. We've got to make sure the damnyankees aren't looking over our shoulder and reading our cards before we ever set 'em down."

"Yes, sir." Potter hoped his resignation didn't show. In spite of everything the Confederate States could do, the United States were going to find out some of what they were up to. The countries were too similar and shared too long a border to keep that from happening. He went on, "As long as we find out more about what they're up to, we're ahead of the game."

"I don't just aim to be ahead of the game. I aim to win it and then kick over the goddamn table." Featherston sounded perfectly serious. He also sounded as angry as usual-not at me, Potter judged, but at the USA.

Really whipping the United States, whipping them to a point where they couldn't hope to fight back, had always been the Confederate dream. Featherston still believed it. Maybe that made him crazy. Potter had long thought so. He wasn't so sure any more.

"Gotta knock 'em flat," Featherston went on. "Gotta knock 'em flat and never let 'em build up again. They tried it with us at the end of the Great War, but they couldn't make it stick. When we do it, we'll fuckin' do it right."

Potter remembered U.S. inspectors in Charleston harbor making sure the Confederate States adhered to the armistice they'd signed. But Jake Featherston was right; the USA hadn't kept that up for long. The United States had wanted to forget about the war, to enjoy what they'd won. They were able to afford it-they had won. For the Confederates, everything since then had been about getting even. With Featherston, everything still was.

If he made the damnyankees say uncle, he wouldn't forget about holding them down. He wanted nothing more than to stand on them with a boot on their neck. For as long as he lived, the United States would go through hell on earth. And if anything could make Jake Featherston a happy man-which was by no means obvious-that would be it.

What would happen after Jake finally went? Potter wondered if the President of the CSA had ever wondered about that. The Intelligence officer doubted it. Everything was personal with Jake Featherston. If it didn't have him in it, he didn't give a damn. Whatever happened after he was gone would just have to take care of itself.

"How would you like to run the operation that makes sure the damnyankees keep on being good little boys and girls?" Featherston asked.

Not only was everything personal with him, he knew who had an axe to grind, and which axe it was. He assumed everybody took things as personally as he did. He knows just what to offer me, by God, Potter thought. He said, "If we get there, I'll do that job for you, Mr. President."

"Oh, we'll get there. Don't you worry about that. Don't worry about it even for a minute." As usual, Jake sounded messianically certain. By being so sure himself, he made other people sure, too. And when they were sure, they could do things they never would have imagined possible before.

The Confederate States had done some things Clarence Potter wouldn't have imagined possible. Could they do more? Could they flatten the United States? A smaller country flatten a bigger one and hold it down? Before this war started, Potter never would have believed it. Now-and especially after he listened to Jake Featherston for a while-he really thought he did.

Hipolito Rodriguez hadn't needed long to decide that Assault Troop Leader Billy Joe Hamilton put him in mind of his Great War drill sergeant. "I want y'all to listen up. Listen up real good, you hear?" he'd say several times a day, sticking out his chin to seem even meaner than he did already. "y'all better listen up good, on account of I ain't got the time to say this shit over and over."

He gave his warning over and over. He didn't seem to realize that. Rodriguez didn't challenge him on it. Neither did any of the other men in his training group. Challenge an instructor and you lost even if you won.

"Anybody here ever hear people talk about a population reduction?" Hamilton asked one day.

A few men from the Confederate Veterans' Brigade raised their hands. The ones Rodriguez knew came from big cities-Richmond, Atlanta, New Orleans.

"Means, 'I'll fix you,' somethin' like that, right?" Hamilton said. "Folks say,, 'I'll reduce your population, you son of a bitch,' right? Doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense, but who said the way people talk's gotta make sense, right? Right?"

"Right!" the men chorused. If loud agreement was what the Freedom Party guard wanted, they'd give it to him.

"That's a bunch of bullshit," he said now. "When we talk about reducing population, we goddamn well mean it. Too many niggers in this country, right? Gotta do somethin' about that, right? Right?"

"Right!" The chorus sounded odd this time. Some of the men bayed out the word in voices full of savage enthusiasm, while others sounded oddly doubtful. Rodriguez's tones were somewhere in the middle. He had no use for mallates, but he'd never been filled with blood lust, either.

The Party guard studied his students. "Some of you sorry sons of bitches are gonna puke like you wouldn't believe when we get rolling on this here job. Some of y'all won't be able to cut it. We'll have to ship your asses home-either that or put you in an easier line of work."

"How come?" somebody in back of Rodriguez called.

"How come?" Billy Joe Hamilton echoed. "You'll find out how come. Bet your balls you will. I got one other thing to tell you, too-no matter how tough y'all reckon you got it, you don't know squat about what tough is. Fellas who were doin' this before we got the system down, they're the ones who can talk about tough. What they saw is tougher'n any battlefield."

"Bullshit." This time, it was a man off to Rodriguez's left. Rodriguez was thinking the same thing himself. Nothing was worse than a battlefield. Nothing could be. He was convinced of that. The Devil hadn't known how to run hell before he took a long look at a Great War battlefield.

"I heard that," Hamilton said. "You go ahead. You think that way. y'all'll find out what it's like now. But that ain't a patch on what camp guards were doin'. No, sir, not even a patch."

Rodriguez remained dubious. Everybody who was an old-timer at this, that, or the other thing always went on and on about how tough things had been before all these new fellows came in. Talk was cheap. Talk was also commonly nonsense.

Camp guards learned by doing. They ran their own camp, out there past Decatur, Texas. They were Great War veterans, every man jack of them. They knew all they needed to know about barbed wire and machine guns. Most of them had taken prisoners, too. Some of them had been prisoners, which also taught a lot about what they needed to know.

Submachine guns were new to Rodriguez, but easy to learn. For guard duty, they were better than the bolt-action Tredegar he'd carried during the last war. No one bullet had the stopping power of a Tredegar round, but you could do a lot of shooting mighty fast with a submachine gun. If you got in trouble in the camp, that mattered more.

"Never trust the niggers here. Never believe the niggers here," Assault Troop Leader Hamilton told his pupils. "You do, you'll end up with your throat cut. They didn't get in here on account of they was nice people. They got here on account of they was trouble."

That Rodriguez believed. The blacks in the camp looked like men who would raise hell if they ever got the chance. They looked like captured enemy soldiers, as a matter of fact. In essence, they were. Rodriguez figured he would have been safer guarding Yankee prisoners. They would have been less desperate than the Negroes here.

A truck with an iron box of a cargo compartment pulled up to the camp. At the morning roll call, the experienced guards picked twenty Negroes from the lineup. "You men are going to be transferred to another camp," one of them told the blacks.

There were the usual grumbles. "I jus' got here two weeks ago," a prisoner complained. "How come you shippin' me somewheres else?"

"To confuse you. Working pretty good, isn't it?" the guard answered. The prisoner scratched his head. He didn't know how to take that, and so he warily accepted it.

Rodriguez was one of the guards outside the barbed-wire perimeter who made sure the Negroes didn't try to run off on their way to the truck. The black men gave no trouble. Most of them seemed glad to get away from where they were. One of the experienced guards closed the doors behind the prisoners and dogged them shut. The bar that did the trick seemed exceptionally sturdy.

"We'll need a driver," Hamilton said. Rodriguez didn't volunteer; he couldn't drive.

They packed him and the other trainee prison guards into a couple of ordinary trucks with butternut canvas canopies over their beds. Those trucks followed the one with the Negro prisoners. Rodriguez wondered where they were going. He didn't know of any other camps close by. Of course, Texas had more empty space than it knew what to do with. Maybe there were others, somewhere not too far over the horizon.

His truck ride lasted about an hour. Looking out at where he'd been-he couldn't see where he was going-he found he'd passed through a gate in a perimeter marked off by barbed wire. Maybe it's another camp after all, he thought.

The truck stopped. "Everybody out!" Billy Joe Hamilton yelled. "y'all got work to do!"

Out Rodriguez came. Like a lot of the other middle-aged men who'd ridden with him, he grunted and stretched. His back ached. The truck had been anything but comfortable.

The other truck, the one with the Negroes in it, had stopped, too, at the edge of a long, deep trench a bulldozer had scraped in the ground. Rodriguez looked around. All he saw was prairie. They were a long way from anything that mattered. He nodded to himself. He remembered this kind of landscape from when he'd fought in the Great War, though he'd been farther west then.

"You!" Hamilton pointed to him. "Open the rear doors on that there truck."

"Yes, Assault Troop Leader!" Rodriguez answered. His pure English would never be great, but he followed what other people said to him, and he could speak enough to get by. Nobody'd complained about the way he talked.

He went over to the truck with the iron box for a passenger compartment. He needed a moment, but no more than a moment, to figure out how the heavy bar that kept the doors closed was secured. He got it loose before the Freedom Party guard either showed him or brushed him aside as a goddamn dumb greaser. That done, he grabbed the handles and pulled the doors open.

"?Madre de Dios!" he exclaimed as the fecal stink poured out of the compartment and into the chilly air. He crossed himself, not once but two or three times in quick succession. None of the blacks in the truck remained alive. They sprawled atop one another in unlovely, ungainly death.

"Isn't this smooth?" Hamilton said. "We take 'em out, we drive 'em off, and they're dead by the time they get where they're goin'. Matter of fact, the only place they're goin'is straight to hell." He shook his head, correcting himself. "Nope-other place they're goin'is right into this here ditch. y'all drag 'em out of the truck and fling 'em in. Then the 'dozer'll scrape the dirt back over 'em, and that'll be the end of that. Good riddance to bad rubbish." He made hand-washing motions.

Nobody said no. The trainees did the job willingly enough. It didn't bother Rodriguez all that much once he got over his first horrified astonishment. The Freedom Party hadn't been kidding when it said it wanted to put Negroes in their place. After all the trouble they'd caused the Confederate States, he wasn't going to lose much sleep over what happened to them.

Into the ditch thudded the corpses, one after another. They were still limp; they hadn't started to stiffen. Good riddance to bad rubbish, the Freedom Party guard had said. To him, and to Hipolito Rodriguez as well, that was all they were. Rubbish.

Somebody asked what struck him as a practical question: "Can we kill 'em off faster'n they breed?"

"Oh, you bet your ass we can." Assault Troop Leader Hamilton sounded as if he hadn't the slightest doubt. "If we want to bad enough, we can do any goddamn thing we please. And Jake Featherston wants to do this really bad. Whatever we have to do to take care of it, well, that's what we do. Pretty soon, we don't got to worry about niggers no more."

The guards murmured among themselves. Most of the murmurs sounded approving to Rodriguez. Nobody who didn't see this as at least a possibility would have volunteered for camp-guard duty. Wiping his hands on his trousers, a trainee asked Hamilton, "How come this used to be a tougher duty than it is now?"

"On account of these trucks are new," the Freedom Party guard answered. "Up until not so long ago, guards had to shoot the niggers they needed to get rid of." His voice was altogether matter-of-fact. "That was hard on everybody. Some guards just couldn't stand the strain, poor bastards. And the niggers knew what was comin' when they got marched outa camp, too. Made 'em twice as dangerous as they would've been otherwise. Some fella named Pinkard, runs a camp over in Mississippi or Louisiana-one o' them places-came up with this here instead."

"?Madre de Dios!" Rodriguez said again, this time in an altogether different tone of voice.

"What's eatin' you?" the Party guard asked.

"I know this Pinkard-or a Pinkard, anyhow," Rodriguez answered. "We fight together here in Texas in the Great War. Not many with this name, I think."

"Reckon maybe you're right," the Freedom Party man agreed. "Ain't that a kick in the nuts? This here Pinkard, he's come up a long ways since then. Runnin' a camp, that's like commanding a regiment."

Rodriguez tried to imagine Jefferson Pinkard as a high-ranking officer. It wasn't easy. It was, in fact, damn hard. The Pinkard he'd known had been an ordinary soldier-till he started having woman trouble. After that, all he'd cared about was killing damnyankees. Up until then, he'd been like any sensible fighting man, more interested in staying alive himself than in getting rid of the enemy. But afterwards… Afterwards, he hadn't cared whether he lived or died.

Evidently he'd lived. And now a lot of mallates were efficiently dead because he had. Rodriguez shrugged and pulled one of them out of the truck. Who'd miss them, after all?