The Grapple

XIX

Rain poured down from a leaden sky. Off in the distance, lightning flashed. Irving Morrell counted hippopotamuses-or was it hippopotami? Whichever, he counted twelve of them before the dull boom shook his barrel. The stroke was more than two miles away. But the rain, dammit, was here, there, and everywhere.

The barrel squelched forward through mud that was starting to look like tomato soup. U.S. armor all over northern Georgia was squelching-except in the places where it was flat-out stuck. The low ceiling grounded fighter-bombers. Even regular artillery was less accurate in godawful weather like this, and shell bursts spent themselves in the mud instead of spreading as they did most of the time.

“Dammit, we need to keep rolling,” Morrell muttered. But how? He’d broken out of the bridgehead south of Chattanooga. No way in hell the Confederates could drive U.S. forces back into the bottle and pound down the cork.

But Morrell didn’t think small. He wanted Atlanta. He wanted it so bad he could taste it. He wanted to see Jake Featherston try to fight a war with the Stars and Stripes flying over the chief Confederate junction between east and west. And he thought he could take Atlanta-as long as his men kept moving, kept pushing, didn’t let up on the bastards in butternut, didn’t give them a chance to regroup, reorganize, catch their breath.

October wasn’t listening to him. The summer had been drier than usual. Fall seemed to be making up for it all at once. “Unfair,” Morrell said. The enemy couldn’t stop him. The enemy had a devil of a time even slowing him down. Why was the weather doing the Confederacy’s dirty work for it?

Dirty work it was. Plowing through this gunk, the command barrel kicked up a bow wave like a destroyer at flank speed. But seawater was clean, not mixed with mud. Anyone this bow wave splashed would turn the color of rust-if he hadn’t already from trying to make his own way through the muck.

More lightning flashed. After a dozen or so hippos, thunder boomed. The rain came down harder than ever. Swearing under his breath, Morrell ducked down into the turret and closed the hatch behind him.

“Thank you, sir,” the new gunner said. Clark Ashton had an infectious grin. “Wondered if I’d have to start bailing there.”

“Not that wet,” Morrell said, though it didn’t miss by much. Frenchy Bergeron had shoulder straps with gold bars on them now, and a platoon somewhere around here. So did Michael Pound, if he hadn’t got hurt since Morrell saw him last. My gunners-a substitute for OCS? Morrell thought with a wry grin.

“No forty days and forty nights?” Ashton said. “Sure coming down like it. If you see a big boat with giraffes and elephants and a guy with a beard, you better watch out.”

“The Ark came down on Mount Ararat,” Morrell said. “That’s in Armenia, not Georgia. The Turks and the Russians have to worry about it. Not us, thank God.”

“Isn’t there a Georgia right next to Armenia?” Ashton asked. “Maybe we’ve floated over from this one to that one.”

“Maybe you’ve floated clean out of your skull,” Morrell said. The gunner took a seated bow, which wasn’t easy in the crowded turret. Morrell rolled his eyes. That only made Ashton bow again.

Word coming in on the command circuits made Morrell do worse than roll his eyes. Unit after unit reported that it couldn’t go forward. Artillery was bogging down too far behind the line to give any kind of worthwhile support. Armored cars couldn’t leave the roads to scout; their tires made them more prone to getting stuck in the mud than barrels or armored personnel carriers. Even infantry units were having heavy going…and soldiers hated nothing worse than flooded trenches and foxholes.

At last, Morrell decided struggling to go forward would cost more than it was worth. He ordered all front-line units to hold in place to give the artillery and logistics train a chance to catch up. He wanted to be ready to reopen the attack when the rains let up-if they ever did.

“You don’t think we’ll sink in the mud if we stop here, sir?” Ashton asked.

Morrell muttered under his breath. That didn’t just strike him as possible; it struck him as likely. He ordered the driver forward till they came to a paved road. That also had its drawbacks. The barrel was too exposed to make him happy. But the curtain of rain drumming down hid the machine almost as well as a smoke screen. And he didn’t want to have to summon an armored recovery vehicle to rescue him if he did bog down. His reputation would be a long time recovering from something like that.

“Here we are,” Ashton said. “The middle of nowhere. Isn’t it lovely this time of year?”

“This isn’t the middle of nowhere,” Morrell said. The gunner raised an eyebrow, as if to say he was too well-bred to argue but it sure looked that way to him. “It isn’t,” Morrell insisted. “Where we are right now, this has to be the southern end of nowhere. Down a little farther, you’ve got Atlanta, and Atlanta’s definitely somewhere.”

Clark Ashton thought for a bit, then nodded. “Somewhere we can’t get to right now,” he said.

“Well, no. Thanks for reminding me,” Morrell said. “When this barrel rolls into Atlanta, the war’s just a long spit from being over.”

Ashton listened to the rain pounding on the barrel’s metal skin. “Seems to me God’s got the long spit right now.”

Morrell grunted. “Seems that way to me, too, and I wish to hell it didn’t.” He patted the front pocket of his coveralls. “And I wish I could have a cigarette.”

“Good luck, sir,” the gunner said. Morrell’s chuckle was distinctly halfhearted. He wasn’t about to light up inside the turret. Barrelmen did that every once in a while, but you had to be really desperate for a butt to take the chance. He would have growled like an angry bear if Ashton or the loader smoked in here, which meant he couldn’t do it himself. Normally, he would have just stood up in the cupola if he wanted a nicotine buzz. With water coming down in buckets, that wouldn’t work, either.

“Won’t kill me to go without,” he said mournfully, and patted that front pocket again.

“How long do you think it’ll be before we can start advancing again?” Ashton asked.

Laughing, Morrell said, “What is it about gunners? You guys can’t stand not to know about anything, can you?”

“I don’t know about anybody else, but I sure can’t,” Ashton said.

“Tell you what,” Morrell said. “Talk to God. If you can make the sun come out and dry up the mud, we’ll roll. Till somebody does…we won’t.”

“If God listened to me, sir, I wouldn’t be in a turret with you-no offense. I’d be in bed with a blonde-or a brunette, or a redhead. I’m not a fussy guy. Any kind of girl would do.”

“Blonde,” the loader said. “If you’re gonna ask, don’t be shy, for Chrissake. With big jugs, too.” He gestured.

“There you go,” Ashton said. “That’d work for me.” He glanced over at Morrell. “What about you, sir?”

“One of these days, I wouldn’t mind leave to go back to Kansas,” Morrell said. “That’s where my wife and daughter are.”

“Yes, sir,” the gunner said. “But you’re here now, and there’s plenty of broads around, and some of ’em’ll put out even if you’re a damnyankee.”

“I don’t need it that bad,” Morrell said. “Agnes isn’t fooling around on me back there, and I don’t feel right about cheating on her.”

Ashton and the loader looked at each other. He could read their minds, though they said not a word. Poor old guy, they had to be thinking. If he had more get up and go in him, he’d nail some of these Confederate bitches any which way. Maybe they were right. Morrell hoped not, but he recognized the possibility. A man in his twenties was a hard-on with legs. A man in his fifties damn well wasn’t, and never looked or acted more idiotic than when he pretended he was.

His earphones crackled with a new report: “Sir, our forward scouts say there’s a Confederate buildup centered on map square Red-14.”

“Have you called artillery in on it?” Morrell asked, maneuvering the map so he could see where the devil Red-14 was. Folding and unfolding the damn thing inside the turret reminded him of a crowded flat with laundry drying on lines strung across the front room. The square lay south and east of Resaca, not too far from where he was himself.

“Yes, sir,” said the voice on the wireless. “Doesn’t seem to be enough to break ’em up. Sure could use a spoiling attack.”

“Well, I believe you,” Morrell said. “Haven’t got a whole lot to spoil with, though. And this damn rain…”

“How much trouble can they cause if they break through there?” the voice asked.

Morrell looked at the map again. He did some more muttering. If everything went precisely wrong, the Confederates could retake Resaca. That would complicate his life. It would mean Atlanta wouldn’t fall any time soon. And it would put him in hot water with the War Department, where you were only as good as what you did yesterday.

“How big a buildup is it?” he asked. If it was brigade strength, maybe even division strength, he would put in a spoiling attack. He wouldn’t just put it in, either-he’d lead it himself. He knew he couldn’t put his hands on anywhere near a division’s worth of men and materiel, but he didn’t care. The Confederates wouldn’t be so sure of that. When barrels came at them out of a curtain of rain, wouldn’t they think twice before they tried attacking? He thought so-they couldn’t afford to get too intrepid. On the other hand, they couldn’t afford not to get too intrepid, either. How did you judge?

He knew how he judged. If they were there in corps strength, he’d have to receive an attack instead of delivering one. That was where he drew the line between aggressiveness and stupidity.

“Sir, best estimate is division strength,” said the man at the other end of the wireless connection.

“Heigh-ho,” Morrell said. “Let’s go.” He thumbed the TRANSMIT button. “Well, we’ll see if we can knock ’em back on their heels. Out.” Then he started calling the armored and infantry in the neighborhood. He wondered if their COs would groan and fuss and flabble and say they couldn’t possibly move in this downpour. Nobody did. They wanted to hit the Confederates. “We’ve been thumping ’em like a big bass drum from Pittsburgh down to here,” an infantry colonel said. “Let’s do it some more.”

Clark Ashton beamed at him when the command barrel squelched forward. “Frenchy told me to expect action when I rode with you,” he said. “He wasn’t blowing smoke, was he?”

“We aren’t here to give those butternut bastards a big kiss,” Morrell answered. “We’re here to blow ’em to hell and gone. And I aim to.”

His scratch force pushed in the Confederate pickets with the greatest of ease. Featherston’s men didn’t seem to dream that anybody could bring off an attack in weather like this. Some of them panicked when they found they were wrong.

Barrels loomed up out through the rain. Morrell called out targets. Clark Ashton hit one after another. Maybe Frenchy Bergeron had told him he’d better be a good gunner if he was going to get along with his new commander. Or maybe even the powers that be feared what Irving Morrell would say and do if they saddled him with a gunner who didn’t know his trade.

The Confederates fell back. Morrell started laughing fit to bust. The rain that had helped the CSA was helping him instead now. The enemy couldn’t tell how small his force really was. The way the U.S. barrels and soldiers pushed forward, they had plenty of weight behind them. They’d have to be nuts to push like that if they didn’t. Featherston’s men, sure they were sane, fell back. Irving Morrell, just as sure he wasn’t, laughed and laughed.

Carefully conned by a pilot who knew his way through the minefields, the Josephus Daniels came into New York harbor. Sailors stood at the rail admiring the tall buildings and boasting of the havoc they would wreak when they got liberty. Sam Carsten remembered leaves of his own when he was a rating, from Boston all the way to Honolulu.

He fondly recalled the lady-well, woman-he’d visited just before he first met George Enos, Jr. And wasn’t that a kick in the head? Funny the kid remembered it after all these years. Actually, Enos was no kid any more-he had to be past thirty. And how many miles have you got? Sam asked himself. Some questions were better left unanswered.

As usual, the pilot knew his business. A good thing, too, since in his line of work your first mistake was much too likely to be your last. Blowing a ship halfway to the moon would get you talked about, and not kindly, even if you lived through it.

“We have the first liberty party ready?” Sam asked Myron Zwilling as the ship approached its assigned quay.

“Yes, sir,” the executive officer answered. “All men with good disciplinary records.”

“That’s fine for the first party,” Sam said. “But I want everybody to be able to go ashore unless we get called back to sea sooner than I expect right now.”

“Yes, sir,” Zwilling repeated, but he didn’t sound happy about it. “Some of them don’t deserve the privilege, though.”

“Oh, come on,” Sam said. “Nobody’s knifed anybody, nobody’s slugged anybody, nobody’s got caught cooking hooch.” There was some illicit alcohol aboard the Josephus Daniels. There’d been some aboard every ship in which Carsten ever served. As long as the chiefs kept things within reasonable bounds, as long as nobody showed up at his battle station too toasted to do his job, the skipper was inclined to look the other way.

“No one’s been caught, no.” By the way the exec pursed his lips, he was inclined to act like a revenuer in the hills of West Virginia. Only Sam’s manifest unwillingness to let him held him back. “But I’m morally convinced there’s a still on this ship, and I’d like to get rid of it as soon as possible.”

“We’ll see,” Sam said. “Meanwhile, though, we’ll do it the way I said.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Zwilling couldn’t disobey an obviously legal order, no matter how much he wanted to.

Happy sailors poured ashore after the destroyer escort tied up. Sam went ashore, too, not to roister but to consult with his superiors. “We keep getting good reports about you, Carsten,” said a captain not much younger than he was.

“Sir, I deny everything,” Sam said, straight-faced.

The officers in the conference room chuckled. One of them sent up smoke signals on his pipe. The captain who’d spoken before said, “How’s the new executive officer shaping?”

“He’s brave and he’s diligent, sir.” Sam believed in getting the good out ahead of anything else. But there was more to say, and he said it: “He’s…kind of a stickler for rules and regulations, isn’t he?”

“Does that interfere with how well he does his job?” the captain asked.

“No, sir, but I had a happier ship with Pat Cooley in that slot,” Sam answered.

“Would you say he’s disqualified from command?”

“No, sir.” Sam left it right there.

He tried to, anyhow. The captain asked, “Would you be happy serving under him?”

Sam had to answer that one truthfully, no matter how little he wanted to. “No, sir,” he repeated.

One of the officers who hadn’t said anything wrote a note in a little book whose pages were held together by a spiral wire. Sam hoped he hadn’t just murdered Lieutenant Zwilling’s career. “Why not?” the captain asked.

“He’ll do everything by the book,” Sam replied. “We need the book. It’s a good thing we’ve got it. But you need to know when to throw it out, too.” He waited to see if they would contradict him. When they didn’t, he went on, “I’m afraid he doesn’t.”

The officer with the notebook wrote in it again. “Thanks for being frank with us,” he said.

“Sir, I’m not happy about it,” Sam said. “Within his limits, he’s a solid officer. He’s plenty brave-I already said that. He’s conscientious. He works hard-nobody on the ship works harder.”

“That’s what the exec is for,” said the captain who did most of the talking.

“Well, yes, sir, but over and above that,” Sam said. “He sticks his nose in everywhere-sometimes, probably, when people wish he wouldn’t. Even when somebody who does that is right all the time, ratings resent it. When he isn’t, that only makes things worse.”

“You’re saying Lieutenant Zwilling sometimes intervenes mistakenly?” the captain asked.

He wasn’t twisting Sam’s words, but he was interpreting them harshly. “It’s not too bad, sir,” Carsten said.

“It’s not too good, either, or you wouldn’t be talking about it,” the captain returned. “Will you tell me I’m wrong?”

“No, sir,” Sam said once more. Lieutenant Zwilling wouldn’t love him-he knew that. But he didn’t love his new exec, either. Pat Cooley had spoiled him.

“Anything else about your ship that we ought to know?” the captain asked.

“Nothing you don’t already know about the class, sir,” Sam answered. “She’s not fast enough to run from a fight, and she doesn’t have the guns to win one.”

That made the officer taking notes smile. “Didn’t you outfight one of the limeys’ merchant cruisers?” he said.

“Yes, sir, but only ’cause they couldn’t shoot straight,” Sam said. “If they’d hit us a couple of times, it would have been all over-the wrong way.”

“Destroyer escorts do a fine job in the roles for which they’re designed,” the captain who did most of the talking said primly.

“Yes, sir,” Carsten agreed. “For escorting convoys, for going after submarines-no problems there. But the Josephus Daniels has done a lot of things she’s not designed for, too. If she keeps doing them, her luck’ll run out one day. I know it’s a busy war. I’m not complaining-but you asked.”

“Most people would say everything was fine and let it go,” the captain remarked. “They’d be afraid of messing up their careers if they popped off.”

Sam laughed. “What have I got to worry about, sir? I’m never going to command a cruiser, let alone anything bigger. Either I stay on my ship till the war’s over or I get a real destroyer. The difference isn’t worth flabbling about. So I guess I can tell the truth if I feel like it.”

“Yond Carsten has a hard and mustang look,” the note-taking officer said. “Such men are dangerous.”

That rang a bell in Sam’s mind. He had to reach way back to figure out why. “Julius Caesar!” he exclaimed. “We did that in English the semester before I chucked school and chucked my father’s farm and joined the Navy.”

“If you still remember, you either had a really good teacher or a really bad one,” the officer said. “Which was it?”

“Miss Brewster was good,” Sam answered. “I can still quote the start of The Canterbury Tales, too… But this isn’t a literature class.”

“No,” the other officer said-wistfully? “But you’ve told us what we need to know. Why don’t you go enjoy New York City? If you can’t have a good time here, chances are you’ve got no pulse.”

“Thank you, sir. I’ll do that.” Carsten got to his feet and saluted. The captain who’d done most of the talking returned the gesture. Sam left before the assembled officers changed their minds. A young lieutenant commander was waiting to go before them next. Saluting him as he went, Sam hurried out.

He flagged a cab. “Where to, Skipper?” the driver asked. He almost dropped his teeth-she was a woman, a brassy blonde somewhere around forty-five.

But why not? If she was pushing a hack, a man could do something more closely connected to the war. “Why don’t you take me to a show?” he said. “Something with singing and dancing and pretty girls in it?” He didn’t want to go to a burlesque house and watch strippers. Well, actually, he did, but he didn’t want to run into sailors from his ship when he did it. Being the skipper had a few drawbacks.

So he let the lady cab driver take him to Broadway instead. That was a longer ride and a classier destination than he’d had in mind, but what the hell. The Winter Garden was a big, fancy theater. JOSE’S HAYRIDE, the marquee said. “This’ll do it?” Sam asked as he paid the driver.

“Pal, if this doesn’t do it, you’re dead,” she answered, unconsciously echoing the officer with the notebook.

Quite a few Army and Navy men were buying tickets, which seemed encouraging. They cost a five-spot, which was either encouraging or appalling, depending on how you looked at things. A pretty usherette guided Sam to his seat.

He liked the music-Woody Butler was one of his favorites. The comic had his trademark greasepaint glasses marked on his face. He spent most of his time leering at the female lead. So did Sam. The cab driver hadn’t been kidding. Daisy June Lee had a beautiful face, legs to die for, and a balcony that outdid anything in Romeo and Juliet. By the howls and whistles from the audience, she was wreaking havoc on every man there. Sam gave forth with his share and then some.

She didn’t show as much of herself as a stripper would have, but what she did show was more worth watching. It wasn’t one of Woody Butler’s best scores, but it was better than most of what the competition put out. Besides, when Daisy June Lee was on stage the orchestra could have been playing kazoos and bazookas for all Sam cared. And even when she wasn’t, the comic with the painted-on spectacles kept him laughing.

He joined the standing ovation when the show ended. When Daisy June Lee took her bows, he hoped she would explode out of her tight top. She bowed extra low, too, as if challenging the laws of gravity. That made the applause even louder and more frantic. The top, of course, stayed in place. She grinned out at the servicemen; she knew what they wanted.

Then the comic came out and made as if to unbutton his shirt. He looked wounded unto death when the crowd laughed instead of cheering. That only made people laugh louder, which made him look more wounded yet.

Sam hated to leave, even if he knew perfectly well that Daisy June Lee was bound to have a boyfriend-and even if she didn’t, she wouldn’t give a damn about an overage two-striper. A man’s reach should exceed his grasp/ Or what’s a heaven for?-another fragment from his lit class ran through his head.

He waved down another cab in front of the Winter Garden. This driver was a man: a man with a hook doing duty for his left hand, the one that stayed on the wheel. He drove well enough. Sam tipped him better than he had the woman who’d taken him to the theater.

“Everything all right?” he asked Lieutenant Zwilling when he came aboard the Josephus Daniels.

“Yes, sir,” the exec said. “You’re back sooner than I expected.”

Sam shrugged. “I had a good time.” Except when I was talking about you, I’m afraid. “You want to see a gal you’ll never forget, go watch Jose’s Hayride at the Winter Garden.”

“Maybe I will, sir.” By the way Zwilling spoke, he didn’t mean it. What did he do for fun? Anything? Poor bastard, Sam thought. Zwilling probably got his kicks telling other people what to do. If that wasn’t a dead-end street, Sam had never seen one.

Flora Blackford turned on the wireless in the kitchen and waited for it to warm up as the coffee started to perk and she used a spatula to turn the eggs frying in a pan. The eggs got done about the time the wireless came on. A few seconds later, two slices of toast popped up. The coffee, running behind schedule, didn’t get dark enough to suit her till she’d almost finished breakfast.

She almost didn’t recognize the patriotic song coming out of the wireless. The singer and her band didn’t seem well matched. She was more than good enough, in a conventional way. The band, by contrast, did things with syncopation and harmonies nobody else in the USA would have imagined. Flora paused with a bite of fried egg halfway to her mouth. Is that…? she wondered.

The song ended. “That was Kate Smith, with ‘God Bless the Stars and Stripes,’” the announcer said. “Backing her is the famous colored combo, Satchmo and the Rhythm Aces.”

“Thought so!” Flora said, and got up to pour herself a cup of coffee.

“Satchmo and his musicians do bless the Stars and Stripes,” the announcer continued, laying on the propaganda with a trowel. “They know too well the bars in the Stars and Bars stand for the imprisonment of their people. We’ll be back with the news on the hour following these important messages. Please stay tuned.”

Those messages were important only to the advertisers who paid for them: a soap company, a cosmetics company, a prominent brand of fountain pens, and a cigarette maker that said its products came from “the finest tobacco available.” She didn’t know how many letters she’d had from constituents in the armed forces complaining about the cigarettes that came with their rations. She couldn’t do anything about those complaints, however much she wanted to; U.S. tobacco simply didn’t measure up to what the Confederates grew.

“And now the news,” the announcer said once his station finally ran out of commercials.

“U.S. forces report significant advances in northern Georgia and western Tennessee despite the rainy weather that has slowed operations in recent days,” the newscaster said. “Our bombers punished Atlanta and Birmingham in heavy raids on industrial areas. Damage to both cities is reported to be extensive.”

“Good,” Flora murmured, though she wondered how true the reports were. If clouds covered the targets, the bombers would drop their loads anywhere they could. If the bombs came down on houses instead of factories…well, who lived in the houses? People who worked in the factories. Any which way, bombardment hurt the C.S. war effort.

“Farther north, our bombers also pounded Richmond,” the newscaster said. “Our losses were light. Little by little, we continue to beat down the enemy’s air defenses. Confederate strikes against Washington and its environs produced only slight damage. No enemy bombers appeared over Philadelphia last night.”

As far as Flora knew, that was true. She hadn’t heard any sirens. They were loud and insistent enough to make sleeping through them almost impossible. She’d done it once or twice, but no more than once or twice.

“Significant advances have also taken place in northern Arkansas, in Sequoyah, and in western Texas, where Confederate resistance seems to be crumbling,” the newsman said.

Flora hoped that wasn’t intended only to keep listeners happy with good news from a front far enough away that they couldn’t easily check up on it. The U.S. Eleventh Army was driving on Camp Determination now. If it fell, U.S. propagandists really would have something to crow about. And, if it fell, wouldn’t that also mean the Freedom Party would have a harder time killing off Negroes in the CSA?

“In an amphibious assault, U.S. Marines recaptured Wake Island, west of the Sandwich Islands,” the newsman said. “There was no fighting, the Empire of Japan having withdrawn its forces before the Marines landed. Japan no longer holds any U.S. possessions.”

And about time, too, Flora thought. That conflict would probably peter out now, the way it had a generation earlier. One of these days, there would have to be a reckoning with Japan-but not yet. Fighting through the fortified islands of the western Pacific to reach the enemy’s homeland was a distinctly unappetizing prospect.

Had Japan been able to seize the Sandwich Islands, the USA would have had a devil of a time getting them back. The U.S. West Coast would have become vulnerable to Japanese air raids. Flora remembered the Japanese strike on Los Angeles during the Pacific War, the strike that nailed the lid down on the coffin of her husband’s reelection hopes. Japan and the CSA could have worked together to cause more trouble in the eastern Pacific these days. But that wouldn’t happen now.

“In foreign news,” the broadcaster continued, “the Kaiser’s forces have inflicted a heavy defeat on the Russian Army east of Kiev, and it now appears certain that the capital of Ukraine will remain in German hands. The Tsar’s wireless broadcasts speak of renewing the offensive as the Russians find the chance-as close to an admission of failure as we are likely to hear from them.”

Flora’s smile was wry. One rule held true in this war: everybody lied. Some countries lied more than others-the Confederate States, France, and Austria-Hungary came to mind. But everyone was guilty of what Churchill called terminological inexactitude now and again. You couldn’t stretch things too far. Otherwise they’d break, and the truth would bite you. But you could let your own people down easy and persuade the other side you still had plenty of fight left…whether you did or not.

“Heavy German bombing raids on Petrograd, Minsk, and Smolensk damaged Russian factories and railroad yards in those cities,” the newsman said. “And the Germans have promised to aid the nationalist uprising in Finland, and say they will recognize the Finnish provisional government.

“As if to counter that German move, the Tsar is appealing to the Russians’ ‘little brothers in the Balkans’-his term-to rebel against Austria-Hungary, whose government he terms ‘unnatural and detested by God.’ In Vienna, the King-Emperor Charles was quoted as saying that if God ever hated any regime, it was surely Russia’s.”

Takes one to know one, Flora thought. Yeah, and you know ’em all. The schoolyard taunts carried more weight when backed up by millions of men and all the munitions two industrialized countries could turn out.

“In western Europe, Germany claims to have begun the liberation of Belgium from British occupation. Prime Minister Churchill says this is utter rubbish, and claims the British Army is merely readjusting its lines. Time will tell.

“German wireless has warned that, if the war continues much longer, England, France, and Russia face what the broadcaster termed ‘unprecedented destruction.’ The French government’s response is too crude to repeat over the air.”

Flora wondered whether the French knew as much as they thought they did. Germany had split the uranium atom before the United States did. The Kaiser could call on an impressive array of nuclear physicists. The United States were getting close to a uranium bomb. Wasn’t it likely the Germans were closer yet?

How close were the Confederate States? That was Flora’s biggest worry. All she knew was what she heard from Franklin Roosevelt, and the Assistant Secretary of War knew less than he wished he did. Flora shook her head. Roosevelt admitted to knowing less than he wished he did. It wasn’t the same thing.

When the newsman started talking about the weather and the football scores, Flora turned off the set. She drank another cup of coffee, did the dishes, called a cab, and went downstairs to wait for it. It showed up in about ten minutes, which was par for the course. The driver held the door open for her.

“Congressional Hall, please,” Flora said as she got in.

“Yes, ma’am.” The man had gray hair and walked with a limp. Flora couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a healthy young man who wasn’t in uniform. Her own son was a healthy young man…and now he was in uniform, too. Maybe the CSA’s uranium bomb wasn’t her biggest worry after all.

The cabby knew the shortest way through the maze of bomb damage that still tied up Philadelphia in the third autumn of the war. Flora gave him a big tip for making good time.

“Thanks a bunch, ma’am.” He tipped his cap.

“Thank you,” she said, and got out her ID to show to the guards at the entrance.

“Go on in, Congresswoman,” one of them said-but only after he carefully examined it. When would these painstaking inspections relax? At the end of the war? Ever? The soldier went on, “One of the ladies will finish checking you.”

In front of a blast barricade, a uniformed woman went through Flora’s handbag and briefcase and patted her down. Then she said, “Go ahead.”

“Thank you,” Flora said resignedly. She doubted the new security measures would end with the war. Too many splinter groups would still have causes and people ready to die for them.

She navigated the maze of drab corridors to her office. A good thing no birds flew these hallways; she was often tempted to leave a trail of bread crumbs, and she couldn’t be the only person who was. Her secretary looked up from the typewriter. “Good morning, Congresswoman.”

“Good morning, Bertha.” Flora let herself into her inner office and closed the door behind her. She telephoned Franklin Roosevelt.

“He’s in a meeting, Congresswoman,” Roosevelt’s secretary said. “He should be back in about an hour.”

“Have him call me when he can, please.” Flora had plenty to do while she waited. The paperwork never went away, and the elves never took care of it when she went home at night. And the telephone rang four or five times before it was the Assistant Secretary of War.

“Hello, Flora,” Roosevelt said. “What’s up today?”

“I wondered if you noticed the news item where the Germans warned England and France and Russia about unprecedented destruction,” Flora said. “Does that mean they’re getting close?”

“I missed it,” Roosevelt answered after a thoughtful pause. “I hope someone close to the project heard it. I hope so, but I don’t know, so I’ll pass it along. In case you’re wondering, we haven’t heard a word from the Germans about this yet.”

“I didn’t think we had,” Flora said. If uranium bombs worked the way the people with slide rules thought they would, the postwar world would have two kinds of country in it: the ones with those bombs, which would be powers, and the rest, which…wouldn’t. “That reminds me-any new word about how the Confederates are doing?”

“Nope. I wish there were, but there isn’t,” Franklin Roosevelt said. “Their number one man in this area hasn’t gone anywhere. He’s still right where he was before the war.”

“But they’re still working on it?”

“Well, we sure think so. They know we are-we found that out. They wouldn’t just ignore it themselves.”

“No, they wouldn’t. I wish they would, but no,” Flora said unhappily. “Are they working on it there, then?”

The Assistant Secretary of War paused again. “Don’t know,” he said at last. “We haven’t been able to prove it, not even close, but… Maybe some people ought to pay a call on them there if they really are. It’s a backwater place, not a lot of targets, so nobody’s gone after it much. Not a lot of obvious targets, I should say. We can probably spare some personnel to find out. Even if the answer is no, we remind more Confederates that they never should have started this war in the first place.”

“Yes.” Flora wondered what her question would end up doing to a backwater place somewhere in the CSA. Some people who’d passed a quiet war would suddenly discover that hell had decided to picnic on their front lawn. She shrugged. If that helped keep Joshua safe, she didn’t care.

Cincinnatus Driver liked the idea of being in Georgia. Georgia was, without a doubt, the deep South. In Kentucky, he’d been right across the border from the USA. Foreign ideas easily wafted south; people said Louisville and Covington were the least Confederate cities in the CSA. Tennessee reminded him of Kentucky, though it seemed…more steeped in the Stars and Bars, perhaps.

But Georgia-Georgia was something else. It was a sign that the United States were really getting somewhere in this war. And it was a scary place for a Negro in the service of the USA to be.

“Ofays here ain’t gonna catch me,” he told a couple of the other truck drivers as they ate supper in a half-wrecked house on the outskirts of Jasper, Georgia, in the hill country north of Atlanta. “I got one bullet I save for me if I’m ever in that kind o’ trouble. Quick and clean is better’n the other way.”

“I guess I can see that,” Hal Williamson said. “White folks around here don’t like you one whole hell of a lot, do they?”

“White folks around here don’t like anything that’s got anything to do with the USA,” Bruce Donovan said. Before Cincinnatus could get mad, he added, “But they especially don’t like colored folks-that’s plain enough.”

“Yeah-ours or their own,” Williamson said.

That made Cincinnatus want to start clobbering white Georgians with his cane…or else to put a clip in his gun and start shooting them. He didn’t think U.S. authorities would arrest him if he did. Odds were they’d just take the gun away from him and send him home. That had temptations of its own, but he thought he did more to hurt the CSA by hauling supplies than he would by murdering a few Confederate civilians.

Williamson lit a Duke, then held out the pack to Cincinnatus and Donovan. After he lit up, he said, “Stories the Negroes tell-man, they’ll curl your hair.”

“Do Jesus!” Cincinnatus said. His hair was already as curly as it could be. He’d seen the same thing in Kentucky and Tennessee and now Georgia: U.S. soldiers were a magnet for the surviving Negroes in the Confederate States. They mostly came in by night; they hid during the day so white Confederates couldn’t finish the job of capturing them and sending them to camps or killing them on the spot.

They were ragged and filthy and skinny, some of them starvation-skinny. They couldn’t tell stories about the camps farther south and west, except to say that people who went in didn’t come out. But they could talk about years on the dodge, scrounging and stealing and hiding. A few talked about whites who protected them for a while. Those stories relieved Cincinnatus; he’d known some decent whites in Covington, and didn’t want to think the Freedom Party had turned all white men in the Confederate States into devils.

Donovan tossed his ration can into a dark corner of the room. The clank it made alarmed all the drivers. You never could tell who was lurking in the dark. Maybe it was a Negro, looking for a new lease on life from the U.S. invaders. Or maybe it was a sniper, a bypassed soldier in butternut or a civilian with a hunting rifle and a grudge against damnyankees.

“What the hell?” To Cincinnatus’ relief, that half challenge came in unmistakable U.S. accents.

“It’s just us. Sorry,” Donovan said, also in tones that could only have been forged north of the Mason-Dixon line.

“Well, watch it. Get your dumb ass shot off if you do shit like that very much.” For all the soldier knew, he was cussing out a general. He didn’t care.

Donovan sighed. He knew he’d been careless, too. He needed a couple of minutes to get back to the subject at hand. When he did speak again, it was much more quietly: “Some of the colored gals who come in, they’re damn good-looking.”

“How come you’re so surprised?” Cincinnatus asked, a certain edge in his voice.

“He musta figured they’d look like you,” Hal Williamson said dryly, which deflated him and set them all laughing.

How many Negro women had Bruce Donovan seen in person before he started driving a truck through the Confederate States? Any? Cincinnatus had no way of knowing. Maybe not. If he came from a small town in the Midwest or the mountains, he might have gone his whole life without running into anybody who wasn’t the same color he was.

Then Donovan and Williamson shared a glance that excluded Cincinnatus. He didn’t call them on it, but he knew what it meant. Some of the colored women coming to the U.S. lines were pathetically anxious to make sure the soldiers in green-gray didn’t turn them back. They had ways to persuade that black men didn’t. Several thunderous bulletins about fraternization and VD had already come down from on high.

When you had to order something more than once, it was a sign people weren’t listening to you. Soldiers would screw if they got the chance. Who wouldn’t? And Confederate blacks were more likely to carry the clap and syphilis than whites. Who would have bothered treating them, back in the days before the war? Even up in Covington, Cincinnatus knew he might easily have got himself a dose if he hadn’t married young. Plenty of guys he knew had.

“What the hell are we going to do with this country once we get done stomping it flat?” Williamson asked, as if his fellow drivers had an answer that eluded the President of the United States and the Congress in Philadelphia. “Everybody white who stays alive’ll hate our guts. All that means is another war as soon as these assholes get back on their feet.”

“Sure worked that way last time around,” Cincinnatus said.

“Anybody sticks his head up and causes trouble, we got to kill him. Simple as that.” Donovan made it sound simple, anyhow.

“How does that make us any better than Jake Featherston?” Williamson asked.

“I’ll tell you how.” Cincinnatus did have an answer for that. “If you’re black here, you don’t gotta stick your head up. Freedom Party don’t care. They want to kill you any which way. Long as we leave folks who don’t cause trouble alone, we’re miles ahead of them bastards, miles and miles.”

Williamson grunted. “Well, you’re right about that.” He pulled out the pack of cigarettes again, looked at it, and shook his head. “Nah. This’ll keep. I want to grab some shuteye, is what I really want to do.”

“Yeah!” Cincinnatus and Donovan both sounded eager. Cincinnatus always sounded eager for sleep these days. He was working harder than he would have in civilian life, and he wasn’t as young as he had been once upon a time.

His back wouldn’t like sleeping on the floor wrapped in a blanket, with a rolled-up jacket doing duty for a pillow. The rest of him didn’t care at all. He sank into slumber like a submersible slipping below the surface of the sea, and he dove deep.

It was still dark when he woke. For a muzzy moment, he thought another thunderstorm was pummeling northern Georgia. Then he realized this was manmade thunder. Muzzle flashes flickered on the walls of the battered house where he slept. The artillery roared and roared and roared again.

“Gun bunnies are working overtime.” Hal Williamson sounded as drunk with sleep as Cincinnatus felt.

“Hope they blast the shit outa whatever they’re aimin’ at.” Cincinnatus waited for some comment from Donovan. All he heard was a snore. He would have thought this barrage loud enough to wake the dead. Evidently not. A few minutes later, he was asleep again himself. You could get used to damn near anything.

Were the fellow who shook him awake at sunup in the Army, he would have been a top sergeant. The man had a leg gone below the knee and was a couple of years older than Cincinnatus, so he was a civilian, too. But he sure as hell acted like a top kick. “Come on, you lazy bums!” he yelled. “You think the goddamn war’s gonna wait for you to get your beauty rest?”

“Have a heart, Ray,” Cincinnatus groaned-a forlorn hope if ever there was one. But hot coffee and real fried eggs resigned him to being conscious. What the ration cans called scrambled eggs weren’t worth eating, even if the ham that came with them wasn’t too bad.

“Where we going?” Williamson asked as he refilled his tin coffee mug.

“Southeast.” Also like a good top sergeant, Ray had all the answers. “Soon as we break out of these fucking chickenshit mountains, get out into the flat country, the Confederates can kiss their sorry ass good-bye. They can’t stop us now. Weather can sometimes, but they can’t. We get down into the flat country, they won’t even slow us down.”

Maybe he was right. Maybe he was wrong. It sounded good to Cincinnatus any which way. The latest depot was only a few hundred yards off. He drove his truck over to it. Soldiers filled the back with heavy wooden crates of artillery ammunition. He liked that. If they needed more shells farther forward, things were going the way they were supposed to.

He didn’t know exactly where the truck convoy was heading. All he had to know was that he was going the same way as the truck in front of him. He shook his head. No, one more thing: if they got bushwhacked, he knew he had to fight back. He had plenty of ammo for the piece on the seat beside him.

But the convoy got through. There’d been more bushwhacking farther north. Here, the Confederates still seemed startled to see Yankee invaders. Cincinnatus feared that wouldn’t last long. If the Confederates could raise hell behind U.S. lines in Kentucky and Tennessee, they could do it here, too.

The gun bunnies were happy to see them. Even though summer was gone and the day was cool, a lot of artillerymen stayed stripped to the waist. “Keep this shit coming, buddy!” said a blond kid with a skull-and-crossbones on his left upper arm. “We’ll blow the whole damn CSA to hell and gone.”

“Sounds good to me,” Cincinnatus answered.

“Yeah, I bet,” the youngster said. “If you could push a button and smash up the country, you’d do it like that, I bet.” He snapped his fingers.

“You was in my shoes, wouldn’t you?” Finding a white man who understood what a Negro might be feeling always surprised Cincinnatus.

Then the gun bunny winked at him. “Bet you can keep a secret,” he said. Cincinnatus made a noncommittal noise. The artilleryman went on, “One of my great-great-grandfathers was about the color you are. Maybe we’re cousins, way the hell down the line.”

“Maybe we are.” Cincinnatus kept his voice neutral as he asked, “So you’re passin’, then?” The fellow with the tattoo couldn’t have more than one-sixteenth Negro blood in him: less, probably, since Cincinnatus had some white blood in him. If the gun bunny hadn’t said he was part colored, Cincinnatus never would have guessed.

“Yeah, I’m passing. It’s easier. You’ve got to know that. None of my girlfriends ever knew-that’s for damn sure. And besides, if the government thought I was a nigger, they never would have let me join the Army. And you know what? I want to kick Jake Featherston’s ass just as much as you do.”

“More power to you, then,” Cincinnatus told him. Would the artilleryman’s kids, when he had them, ever find out they were part Negro? And would it be good or bad if they didn’t? Some of each, probably-most things worked out like that. After a moment, Cincinnatus added, “I got me a couple of half-Chinese grandbabies in Des Moines.”

“How about that? Country’s turning into a regular zoo.” The kid grinned. Cincinnatus grinned back. They reached out at the same time and shook hands.

Driving away from the front, Cincinnatus wondered how many people with a thin streak of Negro blood were passing for white in the CSA. As many as could get away with it; he was sure of that. Acting white instead of black made things easier and more convenient in the United States. Down here, it was a matter of life and death.

He rolled past a burnt-out Confederate barrel in a field. U.S. technicians were salvaging what they could from the machine. Four hastily dug graves lay nearby. Cincinnatus nodded to himself. Death wasn’t coming just to Negroes in the CSA. Whites were getting their share, too. “Good,” he muttered, and drove on.

Jake Featherston stared at the situation maps pinned to the wall of his underground office. He swore under his breath. Despite everything George Patton could do, the abscess in northwestern Georgia was bursting, and damnyankees were spreading all over the landscape. How the hell was the country supposed to hang on to Atlanta? How the hell was it supposed to go on with the war if it couldn’t?

He swore again. He knew the answer to that: uranium bombs. Somehow, the Confederacy had to stand the gaff till they were ready, and to hope like anything the USA didn’t get them first. “Got to hang in,” Featherston said softly. “Got to hang on. Got to.”

A moment later, Lulu poked her head into the office. “Professor FitzBelmont is here to see you, Mr. President,” she said, and sniffed slightly. She didn’t know why the tweedy physics professor was so important to the Confederate States. Jake didn’t think she did, anyhow. Whenever he put something about the uranium-bomb project in writing, he took care of it himself, bypassing her. Security for this couldn’t be too tight. He wouldn’t have let his own shadow know about U-235 if he could have helped it.

All he said now was, “Thanks. Send him in.”

Henderson V. FitzBelmont closed the door behind him. He nodded to Jake. “Mr. President,” he said, and then, belatedly, “Uh-freedom!”

“Freedom!” Jake didn’t get angry at the forced way the professor brought out the slogan, as he would have with most people. He waved him to a chair and asked, “How are you?”

“Sir, I’m alive,” FitzBelmont said wearily as he sat down. “I’m alive, and I’m not hurt. I’ve always tried to be a rational man. I don’t have much use for the idea of miracles. Things are what they are, that’s all. But if anyone wants to say it’s a miracle that I’m here now, I won’t argue with him.”

“I heard Lexington got hit hard,” Featherston said sympathetically. From all the reports he had, Lexington had got one night’s worth of what Richmond took several times a week. “You see what it’s like when you come here. Now you’ve been through it yourself.”

“Seeing it’s one thing. Going through it…” The professor shook his head in stunned disbelief. “How does anybody go through that and stay sane?”

“It’s like anything else, Professor-the first time it happens, it’s the worst thing in the world, but when it happens twenty, fifty, a hundred times, it’s just something you’ve got to deal with and go on,” Jake said.

“If they bomb Lexington fifty times, there won’t be anything left,” Henderson FitzBelmont said, horror in his eyes. “There’s not a whole lot left now.”

“Town’s been lucky up till now,” Jake remarked. Off in the Blue Ridge Mountains, without much industry to draw enemy bombers, Lexington had largely escaped the war. The President of the CSA leaned forward. He could think of only one reason bombers would visit Lexington. “How much damage did they do to the project?”

“Well, sir, the works weren’t badly hurt. A lot of bombs hit around them, but not very many on them,” FitzBelmont answered.

“That’s good news!” Jake meant it from the bottom of his heart. The sooner the CSA got uranium bombs, the better-it couldn’t be too soon.

FitzBelmont raised a warning hand. “It’s not so simple, Mr. President. I wish it were. We lost several men who specialized in enriching the uranium we have and extracting element ninety-four from it-jovium, we’re calling that.”

“Wait a minute. Ninety-four? Uranium’s ninety-two, right? What happened to ninety-three?” Jake Featherston could no more become a nuclear physicist than a clam could fly. But he had a devil of a memory for details.

“Element ninety-three-saturnium, we’re calling it right now-doesn’t have an isotope that yields a useful fission product,” FitzBelmont answered.

“It won’t go boom?” Jake Featherston translated academese into English.

“It won’t go boom.” The professor looked pained, but he nodded. “And Martin, Collins, Delancey, and Dean knew more about isolating jovium than anybody else, and the raid killed three of them and left Delancey…well, maimed.” He grimaced. “I saw him afterwards. It’s not pretty.”

Jake had seen a great many horrors in his life. Henderson FitzBelmont probably hadn’t. He looked a little too young to have fought in the Great War. Chances were he didn’t go in for street fighting, either. “How long will he be out?” Featherston asked.

“I don’t know yet, sir. He’s lost a leg and a hand,” FitzBelmont answered. “He won’t be back soon-I can tell you that.”

“Damn!” Jake said. FitzBelmont wasn’t kidding when he said Delancey’d got maimed. “All right, then. Who are your next best people in Lexington? Who can you bring in from somewhere else? The work has to go on, even if you take casualties. That’s part of what war’s all about.”

“I understand that, but physicists are harder to replace than riflemen,” Professor FitzBelmont said stiffly. So there, Featherston thought. The professor went on, “Just about everyone in the Confederacy who could help is already in Lexington. There weren’t very many nuclear physicists here to begin with. We might be able to bring in a few men from Tulane. They won’t begin to fill the shoes of the people we lost, though. The ones I mentioned were only the most important.”

“Damn!” Featherston said again. “So that means the Yankees sure as hell know where we’re working on the bomb.” Henderson V. FitzBelmont blinked behind his spectacles. Jake spelled it out for him: “Why the fuck else would they plaster Lexington? Your uranium works is the only thing going on there that matters to the war.”

“How…unfortunate,” FitzBelmont muttered.

“Tell me about it!” Featherston pointed to the situation map. “The country’s in trouble, Professor. If anybody’s got a chance to save it, you’re the man. Whatever you need, we’ll give you.”

“What I need most is time. If you hadn’t sent me packing when I first came to you…”

FitzBelmont had nerve, to remind Jake of his mistakes. The President of the CSA sighed heavily. “Ask me for something I’ve got, dammit. Yeah, I was wrong. There. You happy? Not many people ever heard me say that, and you better believe it. But I thought you were selling me snake oil. Can you blame me? It sounded too fantastic to be true. Still does, but I reckon it is.”

“Yes, sir, it is. The United States think so, too,” FitzBelmont said, which made Jake wince. The physicist went on, “If the Yankees hit us once in Lexington, aren’t they likely to do it again? We may take more damage the next time around.”

“I’ve already pulled four antiaircraft batteries away from Richmond and sent ’em west,” Jake said. “I’ve pulled two wings of night fighters, too. We’ll get hit harder here, but we can live with that. We can’t live without you. I didn’t want to do anything special about Lexington before. If we had all kinds of defenses around a no-account little college town, the United States’d be bound to wonder why. Well, now the damnyankees know why, so we’ll do everything we can to hold ’em back.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.” FitzBelmont hesitated, then asked his question: “What do you think the odds are?”

“Not as good as I wish they were.” Featherston wanted to lie, but feared the USA would show he was lying in short order. “We can make hitting Lexington expensive for them. I know that for a fact. I can’t promise we’ll keep everything off you. How much time would you lose if you packed up and went somewhere else?”

“A good deal. Several weeks, anyhow-maybe months.” Henderson V. FitzBelmont eyed the map to which Jake had pointed. “Besides, where would we go?”

That was a much better question than the President wished it were. With airstrips in southern Tennessee, the United States could strike most of the Confederate heartland. “Miami? Houston? Habana? Those look like about your three best choices.”

By the expression on FitzBelmont’s face, he liked none of them. Neither did Jake Featherston. But he didn’t like leaving the facility where it was, either. The devil and the deep blue sea, he thought. Yet the devil lurked in the deep blue sea. U.S. submersibles prowled the Confederate coast. If they sank a ship with the uranium project aboard, they sank the CSA, too.

“How much of your work can you move underground?” he asked. “That’ll give the damnyankees a harder time, anyhow.”

“It will also involve delay.” But Professor FitzBelmont looked thoughtful. “With reinforced concrete above it, perhaps…”

“You need concrete? I’ll give you concrete till it’s coming out your ass,” Jake said. “And we’ll give the Yankees something new to think about pretty soon, too.”

“May I ask what?” The professor was starting to get the hang of security.

Normally, Jake wouldn’t have said boo, but he needed something to buck up FitzBelmont’s spirits-and his own. He made the rules. He could break them. “Yeah,” he said. “We’ve got us a project down in Huntsville, too. Pretty soon-any day now, matter of fact-we’ll be able to fire rockets with a ton of TNT in the nose a couple of hundred miles into Yankeeland. Let’s see ’em try and stop those, by God!”

“That would help. I can see as much. How accurate are they?”

“They can hit a city. They can’t hit a city block.” Jake stabbed a finger out at Professor FitzBelmont. “How heavy will your uranium bomb be? Put one of those in a rocket and it’d be the perfect weapon, near enough.”

“Calculations are still theoretical. The best estimate is on the close order of ten tons,” FitzBelmont answered.

“Shit!” Jake said feelingly. “Need bigger rockets or smaller bombs. Which do you reckon I could get first?”

“Since we don’t have any bomb at all yet, getting larger rockets would seem easier,” the professor said.

“Makes sense,” the President of the CSA agreed. “I’ll tell the boys in Huntsville to get on it, and pronto. Damnyankees haven’t sniffed them out yet, so they can work without having the sky fall on ’em.” He muttered under his breath. “Only a matter of time, probably. Spies everywhere. Everywhere, I tell you.” He made himself brighten. It wasn’t easy. “Wouldn’t that be something, though? A rocket big enough to throw a uranium bomb all the way to San Francisco and Seattle?”

“That would be…remarkable,” FitzBelmont said. “Of course, a just peace would be even better.”

“I offered the United States a just peace two years ago,” Featherston said angrily. His definition of just boiled down to just what I want. “They wouldn’t take it, the bastards. I figured we’d better grind it out of ’em, then, on account of they sure aimed to grind it out of us.”

Henderson V. FitzBelmont started to say something. It probably would have been something like, Look how things are now. Would they be worse if you’d made a softer proposal? Had he said any such thing, Jake would have blown up in his face. The physicist wasn’t so good with people, but he saw that, all right.

“We are going to win this sucker. Win it, you hear?” Jake growled. “We are going to lick the Yankees right out of their boots. Lick ’em, by God. Lick ’em so they stay licked, so we never have to worry about ’em again. It will happen, and you’ll help make it happen. That’s how it’s gonna be. Got it?”

FitzBelmont said the only thing anybody with an ounce of sense would have said: “Yes, Mr. President.”

Maybe he meant it. Maybe he didn’t. But he said it, and he would produce for Jake Featherston and for the Confederate States of America. He would produce, and the Confederate states would win. Jake looked at the unfortunate situation map, then deliberately turned away from the unfortunate situation it portrayed. No matter what was going on in northern Georgia, the Confederate States would win.

The house Jefferson Pinkard rented in Humble, Texas, was one of the finest two or three in town. Edith and Willie and Frank liked it fine. Of course, they would have liked a tent in the woods outside of Humble almost as well. Anything that got them away from the Yankee air raids on Snyder would have looked like paradise on earth to them. Getting away from Snyder looked pretty damn good to Jeff, too.

And Camp Humble looked even better. Ferd Koenig had wanted to call it something fancy: Camp Devastation, or maybe Camp Destruction. Jeff talked him out of it. “Look,” he said in a long, angry telephone call, “any nigger who hears he’s goin’ to Camp Destruction, he’ll know he’s got nothin’ to lose. He’ll be more dangerous than a goddamn rattlesnake. There’s such a thing as asking for trouble, and giving a camp a name like that-well, it’s the picture in the book.”

He got his way. The Attorney General grumbled and harumphed, but the Attorney General was way the hell off in Richmond. He wouldn’t have to live with the consequences of a name like that. No-he’d just blame Jeff for the riots and dead guards that sprang from it.

Camp Humble, now…What could sound more harmless? And what could be more deadly? This camp was done right. Everything Jeff had learned the hard way at Camp Determination went into Camp Humble from the start. The bathhouses had a bigger capacity than his old ones. He had more trucks to help them along. And he had a big, fancy crematorium set up right at the edge of the camp. No more mass graves, no, sir. When Camp Humble reduced its Negro population, it would reduce the coons right down to nothing.

Leaves no evidence behind, he thought. He couldn’t do anything about the mass graves outside of Snyder. Now that Camp Determination was empty and blown to hell and gone, he doubted that the Confederates would bother trying to hold on to Snyder and the territory nearby. They needed soldiers even more farther east. Those graves handed the United States a propaganda victory on a silver platter.

Well, too bad. They could yell all they wanted. It wouldn’t make a dime’s worth of difference in who won the war.

He sighed. Back when he ran up Camp Determination, he’d figured it was in a damn good spot. So had everybody set above him in the CSA. That only went to show people weren’t always as smart as they thought they were. Yes, Snyder, Texas, was out at the ass end of the Confederacy. The damnyankees could reach it anyhow. The older, smaller camps farther east were still going great guns.

And now Camp Humble was, too. Negroes who came in here got dealt with in jig time. All the improvements Jeff had designed into the new camp paid off. Camp Humble also had a Y-ranging station, massive antiaircraft batteries all around it, and a fighter wing assigned to help protect it. U.S. bombers could get here, even if they had to come a long way to do it. They wouldn’t meet a friendly reception if they tried.

So far, they hadn’t tried. Maybe they didn’t know where the new camp was. If they didn’t, they would soon enough; you couldn’t keep a place this size secret very long. But making air raids expensive might be enough to keep them away.

Jeff muttered under his breath. Over by Spencer, the CSA hadn’t been able to make Yankee air raids expensive enough. The USA battered down C.S. air defenses, and went right on battering till U.S. warplanes dominated the skies. That couldn’t happen here-not so far inside C.S. territory. Pinkard hoped like hell it couldn’t, anyhow. If U.S. airplanes started owning the sky over Houston and Humble, the Confederate States were in deep.

He muttered again. By the news filtering out of Georgia, the Confederate States were in deep anyhow. That there was news out of Georgia-no matter how the Party and the government tried to keep it quiet-told how very deep his country was in.

A train whistle blew, off in the distance. Jeff kept the window to his office open a little way so he could hear those three blasts whenever they came. He intended to go on doing that unless it was snowing outside or something. As usual, he wanted to know what would happen before it did. He still prowled through Camp Humble with a submachine gun, looking for trouble spots before they showed up. And when he heard those three toots from the train whistle, he still erupted from the office and headed for the unloading point like a jackbooted force of nature.

Guards in gray uniforms hustled to take their places where the spur from the line through Humble stopped at the camp. Some of them led big, mean, snarling dogs-coon hounds, they laughingly called them, though the German shepherds were nothing like the beasts that went after four-legged coons.

“Come on!” Jeff shouted. “Move your lazy asses!” Anybody who got in position after he did was in trouble, and everybody knew it. Some of the guards, the men from the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades, moved slower than their younger counterparts. He could put the old farts in the stockade or ship them home, but that was about it. He could send younger guards straight to the front if they fucked off. He’d done it, too, though only twice.

The train whistled again. Jeff Pinkard was anything but an imaginative man, but he couldn’t help thinking how mournful that sound was. And yet…Who would mourn the Negroes who went into the bathhouses and the trucks and the crematorium? Nobody white in the CSA, that was for damn sure.

Here it came, smoke puffing from the stack. Sparks flew as steel wheels ground against steel rails. The engineer knew just what he was doing. He stopped the locomotive alongside the flagpole that was his mark and waved to Jeff. As Pinkard waved back, the fellow in the tall cap inside the engine took a pint of whiskey out of his coat and swigged from it. Then he gave a throat-cutting gesture, and then a thumbs-up.

If he hadn’t added the thumbs-up, Jeff would have reported him for drinking on duty and for political unreliability. As things were, the camp commandant just grinned.

“Out! Out! Out!” the guards screamed as they unlocked the crowded cars. “Get moving, you stinking, rasty niggers! Form two lines! Men on the left! Women and brats on the right!” When the Negroes stumbled out of the cars, the guards reinforced the orders with cuffs and kicks. A dog leaped forward and bit a woman. Her shrill scream made the blacks move faster to keep the same thing from happening to them.

Into the camp they went, those who could move. Other Negroes-trusties-carried and dragged those who couldn’t move straight to the trucks. The story was that they were going to a clinic some distance from the camp. In fact, the trucks would go far enough to make sure they were dead, then bring them back to the crematorium. More trusties, these always under the watchful eyes of guards, would load the corpses into the fire, and that would be that.

Before long, the trusties would get it in the neck-in the nape of the neck, to be precise-and go up in smoke themselves. They didn’t know that yet; they thought they were saving their worthless black hides by going along with the guards. But Jeff and the others in gray uniforms had plenty of Negroes to choose from. Blacks were flooding into Camp Humble faster than even this magnificent facility could get rid of them.

Guards and trusties went through the train together, pulling out corpses and the live Negroes who were either too far gone to come out on their own or were playing dead. The bodies went straight to the crematorium. The shammers went straight to the trucks.

One of them saw the wreathed stars on Jeff’s collar and stretched out his hands in appeal. “I didn’t do nothin’, suh!” he said, plainly sensing that nothing good was likely to happen to him. Trusties holding him tight and guards aiming automatic weapons at him gave pretty fair hints.

“You broke a rule,” Jeff said stonily. “They said come out, and you damn well didn’t. There’s a punishment barracks next to the clinic.” By now, he brought out the soothing lies with the greatest of ease. “You spend some time in there, you’ll learn to behave yourself when you get back here.”

The Negro went on squawking, but these weren’t the bad kind of squawks. As long as he thought he would be coming back, he was willing to go where the trusties were taking him-not eager, maybe, but willing. He would have kicked up all kinds of trouble had he thought he was heading for his last truck ride.

Before long, the crematorium went to work. The trusties took jewelry and dental gold from the corpses and gave them to the guards. Keeping any of that stuff sent a trusty into the flames alive. So far, the guards hadn’t caught any of them sticking rings up their ass or anything. Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. Some people would try to steal no matter what.

Smoke belched from the stacks. Jeff swore softly. The smoke smelled like greasy burnt meat. The outfit that ran up the crematorium had sworn on a stack of Bibles that the smoke would be clean, that you’d never know in a million years they were burning bodies. “Lying bastards,” Pinkard muttered. Yeah, some people tried to steal, all right, no matter what. They weren’t all black, either.

He wrinkled his nose against the stink. Sometimes half-charred bits of flesh came flying out of the stacks, sucked up along with the hot gases. There was a lot more soot than the manufacturers promised, too.

Pulling out a notebook, Jeff scribbled in it. Before long, he’d send Richmond a nasty letter. With luck, he could put the company’s ass in a sling. He did some more muttering. He hoped the people back in Richmond weren’t too busy with the war to come down on some not so petty grifters who’d grabbed a fat contract by promising more than they could deliver.

He wondered if he ought to see where he could put mass graves in case the crematorium just didn’t work out. That would be harder around here than it was around Snyder; this country was more thickly settled. And the ground here was a lot swampier than it was farther west. The stink from graves might be even worse than what the crematorium turned out. All those bodies might pollute the ground water and start epidemics, too. He supposed he’d have to talk to a doc about that.

So goddamn many things to worry about.

But Camp Humble was up and running, even if it had a few rough spots. Camp Determination was nothing but a memory. Jeff could go home to Edith and his stepsons every night proud of what he’d accomplished. And pretty soon he would have a baby of his own. Wouldn’t that be something?

One of the guards came up to him. “Sir?”

“What’s up, Cromartie?” Jeff tried to know everybody’s name.

Cromartie looked shamefaced. “Sir, I’ve got the clap,” he blurted. “Troop Leader Mauch said I had to tell you, or he’d tear off my dick and stuff it up my… Well, he said I had to let you know.”

“You fucking idiot,” Jeff said, which was exactly Cromartie’s trouble. “Did you catch it here?”

“Reckon so, sir. I sure didn’t have it before.”

“All right. Get your sorry ass over to the doc. He’ll have some pills for you. I’m gonna gig you three days’ pay, and word of this will go on your record.”

Miserably, Cromartie nodded. Even more miserably, he shuffled away. Jeff laughed, but only quietly-no fool worse than a horny fool. The laughter didn’t last. No matter how well Camp Humble ran, he wished he were still several hundred miles farther west. That would have meant the Confederacy was winning the war.