The Grapple

II

Clouds and rain and sleet shrouded the North Atlantic. A few hundred miles to the west of the Josephus Daniels lay Newfoundland. To the east of the destroyer escort, probably, lay trouble. The British never stopped sending arms and men to Newfoundland and to Canada to give the rebellion against the USA a helping hand. Lieutenant Sam Carsten and the skippers of his fellow picket ships did everything they could to keep the limeys from getting through.

He halfheartedly swore at the weather. It made enemy ships all that much harder to find. The rain and sleet even interfered with the Y-ranging gear. The wireless waves bounced back from raindrops, too. A good operator could peer through the interference, but it sure didn’t make life any easier. And the old-fashioned Mark One eyeball had a very short range here.

He swore only halfheartedly because the weather suited his own needs very well. He was a short step away from being an albino. His skin was pink, his eyes pale blue, and his hair white gold. It was even whiter these days than it had been when he was younger-he’d spent almost thirty-five years in the Navy now. Summer in the tropics was a never-ending misery for him. Summer in Seattle was a misery for him, and that took doing.

His executive officer was a young, auburn-haired lieutenant named Pat Cooley. If not for Sam, the exec might have been the the fairest man on the ship. Cooley had gone through Annapolis, while Sam was a mustang who hadn’t made ensign till some years after the Great War.

Cooley was a comer, a hotshot. He’d have a ship of his own before long. Sam didn’t want the exec promoted out from under him, but he knew things worked that way. As for himself, when he walked into the recruiting office all those years ago he never dreamt he would wear two stripes on his sleeve. He’d just been looking for a way to escape walking behind the north end of a southbound mule for the rest of his life.

The Josephus Daniels pitched down into the trough between two waves. Seas on the North Atlantic weren’t quite so fierce and mountainous as they had been earlier in the winter, but they weren’t any fun, either. “You all right, Mr. Cooley?” Sam asked when the exec grabbed for something to steady himself.

“Yes, sir. Just clumsy.” Cooley’s eyes were green as a cat’s. Just now, he looked like a cat that had rolled off a bed and was trying to pretend it hadn’t.

“Insides not turning inside out?” Sam had rounded the Horn more than once. Those were the only seas he knew that put the North Atlantic to shame. He hadn’t been seasick. He might sunburn in anything this side of a cloudburst, but he had no trouble keeping his grub down.

Pat Cooley was a good sailor. The North Atlantic seemed intent on showing good sailors they weren’t as good as they thought. Here, though, the exec shook his head. “Not giving me any trouble right this minute,” he said: a precise man’s cautious answer.

“Skipper?” That was a very young, very junior lieutenant, junior grade, named Thad Walters: the officer responsible for the care and feeding of the Y-ranging gear. He looked up from the green blips on his oscilloscope screens. “I’ve got something showing.”

“A ship?” Sam asked. Even troubled by the weather, the Y-ranging set was more likely to pick up limeys trying to run the U.S. gauntlet than lookouts were.

But the j.g. shook his head. “No, sir. It’s an airplane. Have we got a carrier in the neighborhood?”

“If we do, nobody told me, that’s for damn sure,” Sam answered. Nobody’d warned him a British carrier was operating in the neighborhood, either. That could be very bad news. A beat slower than he might have, he heard exactly what Walters said. “Wait a second. An airplane?”

“Yes, sir. Y-ranging gear sees one. Speed two hundred. Bearing 085. Range…Range is twenty-five miles and closing-he’s heading our way.”

“Just one, though?” Sam persisted. “Not a bunch of them?”

Walters shook his head. “Sure doesn’t look like it. The set could pick them out at that range.”

“All right.” Carsten turned to the exec. “Call the men to general quarters, Mr. Cooley. If he finds us in this slop, we’ll have to try to shoot him down.” He’d been attacked from the air before, even back in the Great War. He didn’t enjoy it, not even a little bit.

“General quarters. Aye aye, sir,” Cooley said. Klaxons hooted. Sailors started running like men possessed. They dashed into the turrets that held the Josephus Daniels’ two 4.5-inch guns. And they manned all her twin 40mm antiaircraft guns and the.50-caliber machine guns that supplemented them. The unknown airplane would get a warm reception, anyhow.

As soon as Sam heard the snarl of an airplane engine off in the distance, he said, “Evasive action, Mr. Cooley.”

“Evasive action-aye aye, sir.” Cooley was a better shiphandler than Sam was. Sam had never had his hands on a wheel till he took over the Josephus Daniels. He was a lot better now than he had been then, but the exec was better still. “All ahead full!” Cooley called down to the engine room, and the throb of the destroyer escort’s own engines picked up.

Cooley started zigzagging the ship across the ocean, lurching now to port, now to starboard, at random times and angles. But the Josephus Daniels was only a destroyer escort, not a full-fledged destroyer. She had a smaller crew, a smaller hull, and a smaller powerplant than a destroyer proper. She couldn’t come within several knots of a real destroyer’s speed. One of these days, that would hurt her. Sam felt it in his bones. He hoped today wasn’t the day.

The airplane with the blue-white-red British roundel broke through the clouds. “All guns open fire!” Sam shouted. They did. The racket was impressive. Even the popguns that were the Josephus Daniels’ main armament could fire antiaircraft shells. Black puffs of smoke appeared around the British aircraft.

Sam nodded to himself in more than a little satisfaction. He was still no great shakes as a shiphandler, no. But gunnery aboard the Josephus Daniels was far better than it had been when he took over the ship. He’d been part of a five-inch gun crew before becoming an officer; he knew what was what there.

That airplane jinked and dodged like the destroyer escort, though much faster. It had a bomb slung under its belly. It also had floats under the belly and each wing. Despite its maneuvers, it bored in on the Josephus Daniels. The bomb fell free. The airplane raced away. Cursing, Pat Cooley swung the ship hard to starboard.

With a roar and a great gout of water hurled into the sky, the bomb burst about a hundred yards to port. The airplane vanished into the clouds. For all the shells the gunners threw at it, Sam didn’t think they’d hit it. He hoped no splinters from the bomb casing had sliced into his crew.

“Nice job, Pat,” he said.

“Thank you, sir,” the exec answered. “Every so often, this looks like work, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe a little,” Carsten answered. They smiled at each other, both glad to be alive. Sam went on, “Well, we don’t have to worry about a limey carrier, anyway.”

“Sir?” Cooley said.

“Oh. I guess you were kind of occupied.” Sam chuckled under his breath. “Son of a bitch was a floatplane. A freighter could catapult-launch it, let it scout around, and then haul it out of the drink with a crane.”

“Damn. My hat’s off to the pilot,” Cooley said. “I sure as hell wouldn’t want to try putting a plane down on the water in seas like this.”

“Good point.” Sam hadn’t thought of that, but he nodded. “When I was on the Remembrance, we wouldn’t launch or land aircraft from the flight deck in this, let alone try to get down on the sea. But that’s not my worry… Mr. Walters!”

“Sir?” the Y-range operator said.

“You still have that airplane on your screen? What’s his course?”

“Flying out at 085, sir-going out on the reciprocal of the vector he came at us on.”

“All right.” Sam turned back to the exec. “Mr. Cooley, bring our course to 080. Let’s see if we can follow him back more or less down his trail and find the ship that sent him out.”

“Changing course to 080, sir.” Cooley’s smile was predatory. “You’d make a good duck hunter.”

“Thanks. You’ve got to lead them a little,” Sam said. “The limey’ll still be heading west. If we get close, the Y-ranger will spot him.”

“Here’s hoping, anyway,” Walters said.

“You’ve done it before,” Sam said. “If we do find the ship, let’s just hope she’s not loaded for bear like the last one we met.”

“We’ll be ready this time, anyhow,” Pat Cooley said. Sam nodded. The British had taken to mounting guns on some of their freighters. The Josephus Daniels got a nasty surprise the first time she ran into one of those. She’d outfought the Karlskrona, but Sam still shuddered thinking about what might have happened if one of those big shells had hit his ship.

He wondered how far that floatplane had come from. If it was a hundred miles, the destroyer escort would never find the ship that had launched it. He wouldn’t have wanted to try to find the ship after flying a hundred miles each way through this kind of weather. He’d seen the limey pilot had guts. But wasn’t there a difference between having guts and being out of your skull?

He’d sailed east and a little north for about an hour when Lieutenant Walters stirred at his set. “Something?” Sam asked hopefully. The Josephus Daniels was up at the crest of a swell, which let the Y-ranging gear see a little farther.

“I-think so, sir,” the j.g. answered, and then grimaced. “Gone now.” They’d slid into the trough. He waited till the ocean carried the ship higher again, then nodded. “Yes, sir. Range, eight miles. Bearing 075.”

“Nice navigating, sir,” Cooley said.

“Thanks. Change course to 075,” Sam answered. In good weather, he would have seen the stranger’s smoke before he got within eight miles. But the weather wasn’t good, and wouldn’t be for weeks.

He drew within a mile of the freighter before he spotted her. The message he blinkered over was hard and uncompromising: HEAVE TO. SURRENDER. ANY FALSE MOVES AND WE FIRE WITHOUT WARNING. Once bitten, twice shy, he thought. Through binoculars, he could see the airplane that tried to bomb the Josephus Daniels stowed aft of the bridge.

The rustbucket ran up a white flag even as he ordered a shot across her bow. He wasn’t the only man scanning her for anything the least bit wrong. If canvas was thrown aside to clear hidden guns…But it wasn’t, not this time.

Feeling piratical, he sent across a boarding party armed with rifles and pistols and submachine guns. The British sailors offered no resistance. “’Ow the bleedin’ ’ell did you find us?” their skipper asked when the Americans brought him back to the Josephus Daniels.

Sam almost told him. Why not? The limey wasn’t going anywhere. But the urge to take no chances prevailed. “Just luck,” he answered, and smiled to himself. “Yeah, just luck.”

Twice built, twice destroyed. Sergeant Armstrong Grimes strode through the wreckage of Temple Square in Salt Lake City. The Mormons had risen during the Great War, and been brutally smashed. They waited for years. They finally got their civil rights back from President Al Smith. And then, no doubt with Confederate encouragement, they rose against the USA again. And now the Temple and the Mormon Tabernacle were rubble again, perhaps more finely pulverized rubble than they had been a generation earlier.

Armstrong’s eyes flicked now this way, now that. Since Lieutenant Streczyk got wounded, he’d commanded a platoon. One of these days, a new junior officer might take charge of it. Armstrong wasn’t holding his breath. The war in Utah got what the war against the CSA didn’t need. Since the war against the CSA needed everything, the war in Utah got…hind tit.

Corporal Yossel Reisen walked through the wreckage, too. Like Armstrong, the Jew from New York City held his Springfield at the ready. Reisen took a drag at the cigarette that hung from the corner of his mouth. “Well, here we are. We’ve liberated Temple Square,” he said.

“Yeah.” Armstrong looked around. He didn’t see a piece of rock bigger than about two by two. The United States had expended a lot of bombs and shells on this place. “We’ve liberated the living shit out of it, haven’t we?”

Here and there, Mormon civilians who’d lived through the fighting were starting to come out of their holes. They said they were civilians, anyway. Orders were to treat them as civilians unless they showed signs of being dangerous. Armstrong didn’t know why the U.S. government was trying to win the locals’ hearts and minds. That had been a losing game for more than sixty years now. But he didn’t shoot at people he would have tried to kill not long before.

That didn’t mean he wanted the Mormons coming anywhere near him. One of the ways they could show signs of being dangerous was by blowing themselves up, along with whatever U.S. soldiers happened to be within range of the blast. Mormons had invented people bombs, and still used them to deadly effect.

And they weren’t the only ones who did. Plainly, they’d hit upon an idea whose time had come. Blacks in the CSA used people bombs to strike at the Freedom Party. Half a dozen Balkans groups were using them against Austria-Hungary. Armenians blew themselves up to hit back at the Ottoman Turks. In Russia, the Reds had lost a long, brutal civil war to the Tsar. Now their remnants had a new weapon, too.

Other soldiers in green-gray kept chivvying the emerging Mormons away from them. Most of the civilians were women. That cut no ice with Armstrong Grimes. The first person he’d seen using a people bomb was a woman. And plenty of Mormon women picked up rifles and grenades and fought alongside their husbands and brothers and sons.

“You ever…pay a Mormon gal back?” he asked Yossel Reisen.

Reisen was watching the women, too. He shook his head. “Not like that. You?”

“No,” Armstrong said. Not many Mormon women let themselves be captured. They had reasons for fighting to the death, too. The revenge U.S. soldiers took was basic in the extreme. Gang-raping captured Mormon women was against orders, which didn’t mean it didn’t happen.

Off to the north, artillery boomed. U.S. airplanes buzzed overhead, some spotting for the guns, others dropping bombs on Mormon positions. The Confederates would have hacked the lumbering, obsolescent bombers out of the sky with ease. Against enemies who didn’t have fighters and didn’t have much in the way of antiaircraft guns, they were good enough.

“Blow all the bastards to hell and gone.” Armstrong picked up a chip of granite that might have come from the Temple. “Then we can get on with the real war.” He flung the stone chip away. It bounced off a bigger rock and disappeared in the rubble.

Yossel’s expression changed. He bent and picked up a bit of stone, too. Tossing it up and down, he murmured, “I wonder what Jerusalem is like these days.”

“Huh?” Armstrong knew what Jerusalem was like: a sleepy Ottoman town full of Arabs and Jews where nothing much had happened for centuries.

But his buddy said, “We had our Temple destroyed twice, too.”

He didn’t usually make a big deal out of being a Jew, any more than he made a big deal out of being a Congresswoman’s nephew-and not just any Congresswoman, but one who’d also been First Lady. “You guys are real Americans,” Armstrong said. “Hell, you’re a gentile here-just ask a Mormon.”

“I know. I think it’s a scream,” Yossel Reisen said. “Yeah, we’re real Americans-or we try to be, anyhow. But we sure didn’t make real Romans a couple of thousand years ago. That’s why the Second Temple got it.”

“I guess.” Except for what little Armstrong remembered from a high-school history class and from Julius Caesar in English Lit, ancient Rome was a closed book to him.

“We think the Mormons are nuts, and we treat ’em that way, and what happens?” Yossel said. “Bang! They rise up. We treat Jews all right, and they’re happy and quiet. The Romans thought my ancestors were nuts, and they treated ’em that way, and what happened? Bang! The Jews rose up.”

“Bunch of bullshit, if you want to know what I think,” Armstrong said. “We were nice to the Mormons right before the war, and what did we get for it? They kicked us anyway, soon as we got busy with Featherston’s fuckers.” He might not know ancient history, but he remembered the end of the occupation of Utah. Fat lot of good ending it did anybody.

“Yeah, there is that,” Yossel allowed. “Maybe you just can’t make some people happy.”

“Better believe you can’t,” Armstrong said. “These bastards have spent the last God knows how long proving it, too.” He was some small part of what the U.S. government had done to Utah, but that never entered his mind. Neither side, by then, worried much about who’d started what and why. They both knew they had a long history of hating, mistrusting, and striking at each other. Past that, they didn’t much care.

Yossel Reisen pointed to another corporal trudging through the wreckage of Temple Square. He nudged Armstrong. “You recognize that guy?”

Armstrong eyed the two-striper. He looked like anybody else: not too young, not too old, not too big, not too small. But he didn’t look like anybody Armstrong knew, or even knew of. Maybe that didn’t mean anything. Now that Temple Square had finally fallen, it drew its share of gawkers.

But maybe it did mean something. The USA had trouble fighting the Mormons just because they looked so ordinary. They had no trouble getting U.S. uniforms, either. Down in the CSA, the Freedom Party knew who was a Negro and who wasn’t. Here…Armstrong unslung his Springfield. “Let’s go check him out.”

The corporal wasn’t doing anything to draw notice; he ambled around with his hands in his pockets. Once he bent down and picked up a bit of rock and stowed it away. To Mormons, pieces of the Temple were sacred relics. But to U.S. soldiers who’d gone through hell to get here, they made good souvenirs. Carrying one didn’t say a thing about what you were.

“Hey!” Armstrong said, quietly slipping off the Springfield’s safety.

“You want something, Sarge?” The corporal sounded like anybody else, too. Mormons did.

“Yeah. Let’s see your papers.”

“Sure.” The noncom started to take something out of his pocket.

“Hold it right there!” Yossel Reisen snapped. Armstrong didn’t like the way the stranger’s hand bunched, either. He sure looked as if he was grabbing something bigger than a set of identity documents. “Take both hands out, nice and slow,” Yossel told him. “If they aren’t empty when you do, you’re dead. Got it?”

“Who are you clowns?” the corporal demanded. “You Mormons trying to hijack me? You won’t get away with it!”

If he was trying to put the shoe on the other foot, he had balls. Armstrong gestured with his Springfield. “Do like my buddy says.” His own balls tried to crawl up into his belly. If this guy was a Mormon and what he had in there was a detonator…But his hands came out empty.

Yossel reached into that pocket and pulled out a pistol: not an Army.45, but a smaller revolver, a civilian piece. Armstrong’s suspicions flared. Then Yossel found the other corporal’s papers. He looked from the photo to the man and back again. He shook his head.

“Let’s see,” Armstrong said. His pal showed him the picture. It was of a guy noticeably darker and noticeably skinnier than the fellow in the uniform. Armstrong gestured with the rifle again. “Come on. Get moving. You got a bunch of questions to answer.”

“I haven’t done anything!” the corporal said. One thing he hadn’t done was swear, not even once. Most U.S. soldiers would have. Mormons watched their mouths better.

“Well, you’ll get the chance to prove it,” Armstrong said. “Yossel, grab his rifle.”

Carefully, Yossel Reisen unslung the other corporal’s Springfield. “Move,” he told the man.

Still squawking-but still not cursing-the soldier who might not be a soldier moved. They led him back over the ground for which the Mormons had fought so long and so hard, the ground that was cratered and crumpled and crushed, the ground over which the stench of death still hung. That would only get worse when the weather warmed up. Armstrong wondered if it would ever leave the land, or if the foul, clinging odor would linger forever, an unseen but unmistakable monument to what Salt Lake City had gone through.

Sentries outside of regimental headquarters popped up out of the foxholes where they spent most of their time-not every sniper had been hunted down and killed. “What the fuck’s going on here?” one of them demanded. He talked the way most U.S. soldiers did.

“We caught this guy up by the Temple,” Armstrong answered. “Yossel here spotted him.” It didn’t occur to him till later that he might have taken the credit himself. He didn’t want to screw his buddy. “We figure maybe he’s a Mormon. His papers don’t match his face, and he was carrying this little chickenshit pistol-show ’em, Yossel.” Reisen displayed the revolver.

The sentry eyed the corporal who didn’t seem to be a corporal. “Waddayou got to say for yourself, Mac?” he asked, his voice colder than the weather.

“They’re full of baloney,” the-maybe-two-striper said. Not shit-baloney. He added, “I don’t like a.45-kicks too hard.”

“Huh,” the sentry said, no doubt noticing, as Armstrong did, that that-maybe-Mormon didn’t say anything about his papers. The sentry nodded to Armstrong and Yossel. “Bring him on in. They’ll find out what’s going on with him. And if it is what you think it is…” He didn’t go on, or need to. If it was what they thought it was, the fellow they’d captured was a dead man. He wouldn’t die quickly or cleanly, either. Oh, what a shame, Armstrong thought, and led him on.

Cincinnatus Driver hadn’t been under fire for more than twenty-five years. He’d forgotten how much fun it wasn’t. If he hadn’t forgotten, he never would have volunteered to drive a truck in a combat zone again. He would have stayed back in Des Moines and found work in a war plant or tried to bring his dead moving and hauling business back to life.

But he’d been flat on his back in Covington, Kentucky, when the state passed from the USA back to the CSA. He supposed he was lucky: the car that hit him didn’t kill him. It didn’t seem like luck while he was recovering from a broken leg and a fractured skull and a smashed shoulder. Even now, almost two and a half years later, he walked with a limp and a cane and sometimes got headaches that laughed at aspirin.

He was finally exchanged for a Confederate the USA was holding-U.S. citizenship meant something, even for a Negro. It didn’t mean everything; Negroes in the United States couldn’t join the Army, couldn’t pick up rifles and go after the enemies who were tormenting their brethren south of the Mason-Dixon Line. With his age and his injuries, Cincinnatus wouldn’t have been able to join the Army if he were white.

This was the next best thing. He’d driven trucks for more than thirty years. He’d driven for the USA during the Great War. Here he was, doing it again, part of a long column of green-gray machines hauling ammunition and rations to the U.S. troops trying to drive the Confederates out of western Ohio.

The state of the art had improved over the past quarter-century. The Chevy truck he drove now had a much more powerful, much more reliable engine than the White he’d used then. It had a fully enclosed cabin, too, and a heater. It boasted a self-starter; he didn’t have to crank it to life. Its headlights were electric, not acetylene lamps. With all-wheel drive, it could get through terrain that would have shaken the White to pieces.

But the driving wasn’t much different. Neither was the fear when shells started bursting in the field to either side of the road. Cincinnatus’ mouth went dry. His sphincters tightened. He wanted to stop and turn around and get the hell out of there.

A.45 lay on the seat beside him. He couldn’t afford to let the Confederates capture him. It wasn’t just that he was colored, though no black man in the USA wanted to think about falling into Confederate hands. But he was also on the CSA’s list of dangerous characters. When they removed him from Covington, they made it very plain they didn’t want to have anything to do with him ever again. They might regret it if they did, but he would never get over it.

Next to those bursting shells, the.45 seemed like small potatoes. Next to the dreadful immensity of the war, Cincinnatus himself seemed like small potatoes: just one man, and an ordinary man at that. But all you could do was all you could do. Everybody was just one person, doing what he or she could do. Added together, all those people made up the USA and the CSA-made up the war. If, added together, all the people of the USA could do more…

“They better,” Cincinnatus said, there alone in the cab of the Chevrolet truck. Imagining a North America dominated by the Confederacy and the Freedom Party…He didn’t want to do it. He’d seen what Covington was like after the Stars and Bars replaced the Stars and Stripes. Thinking of that happening everywhere made him a little sick, or more than a little.

One of the incoming shells hit a truck a couple of hundred yards ahead of him. The truck, loaded with the same sort of cargo as his, went up in a fireball. Luckily, it careened off the road instead of blocking it. All the same, Cincinnatus hit the brakes. He didn’t want to get any closer than he had to till that ammo finished cooking off.

Could have been me, he thought, and shuddered. It would have been him if one of the Confederate artillery men had paused to scratch an itch or stick a fresh chaw in his mouth before pulling the lanyard. About fifteen seconds later, his truck would have been where that shell landed.

He sped up when he went past the shattered deuce-and-a-half. Not a chance in hell the driver got out. He hoped the man died fast, anyhow. Given the size of that explosion, the odds seemed good.

Another shell left a crater in the road, forcing Cincinnatus over onto the soft shoulder to get around it. With power to all six wheels, he managed to get by without bogging down. He hoped the trucks that came after his would be able to do the same. Each one chewed up the ground more and more.

The truck column rolled into Findlay about five minutes later. Here and there around the town, tall columns of black, greasy smoke rose into the air: oil wells torched by the retreating Confederates. A team of U.S. engineers was trying to put one out as Cincinnatus came into town. He wondered if retreating U.S. soldiers had fired the wells a year and a half earlier, leaving the Confederates to get them working again. He wouldn’t have been surprised.

He didn’t get long to worry about it. “Come on! Come on! Over here!” a sergeant bellowed, waving like a man possessed. Cincinnatus did his best to follow the noncom’s instructions. At last, the sergeant threw up both hands, as if he’d just scored a touchdown. He stopped.

A swarm of soldiers descended on the truck, transferring the munitions and rations to several smaller trucks for the trip to the front. It wasn’t far away; Findlay itself had fallen only a few days before. Shells still came down on the town, as they’d landed on the road to the northwest. The faster the explosives left Cincinnatus’ truck, the happier he would be.

Of course, as soon as the deuce-and-a-half was empty, he had to drive back to the big depot in Defiance to load up again for another trip to Findlay. The CSA had heavily bombed Defiance earlier in the war. Not many enemy airplanes came over these days. U.S. fighters and bombers took off from airstrips on the outskirts of town. Antiaircraft guns by the score poked their long snouts up toward the sky. Camouflage netting masked some of them. Others stood out in the open, as if warning the Confederates they were there.

Cincinnatus gulped a sandwich and drank coffee while they filled his truck again. There was one other Negro driver in his transport unit. Douglass Butler came from Denver, of all places. He talked like a white man. Cincinnatus’ son and daughter had grown up in Des Moines, and lost a lot of their Confederate Negro accent. Cincinnatus had lost some of it himself; he’d noticed that when he got stuck in Covington. But Douglass Butler didn’t have any, and apparently never had had any. He puffed on a cigar, waiting for his truck to get reloaded.

“My dad went out to Colorado to see if he could get rich mining,” he said, every vowel sharp, every consonant distinct. “He didn’t-only a few people did-and he ended up running a grocery store. I started driving a truck for him, but I found I liked driving more than I liked the grocery business.”

“Folks out there give you a lot of trouble on account o’-?” Cincinnatus brushed two fingers of his right hand across the back of his left to remind the other Negro what color they were.

“Well, I know what nigger means, that’s for damn sure.” Butler shrugged. “But Jews are kikes and Chinamen are Chinks and Irishmen are micks and Mexicans are greasers and Italians are wops and even Poles are lousy Polacks, for God’s sake. I don’t get too excited about it. Hell, my brother’s married to a white woman.”

That made Cincinnatus blink. “Work out all right?” he asked.

“They’ve been married almost twenty years. People are used to them,” the other driver said. “Every once in a while, John’ll hear something stupid if he’s standing in line for a film with Helen or out at a diner or something like that, but it’s not too bad.” He chuckled. “Of course, he’s my big brother-he goes about six-three, maybe two-fifty. I don’t care if you’re green-you want to be careful what you say around him.” He was of ordinary size himself.

“Does make a difference,” Cincinnatus agreed. He wondered if John Butler was named for John Brown; with two s’s in his first name, Douglass Butler was bound to be named for Frederick Douglass.

Before he could ask, somebody shouted that their trucks were ready to roll. “Got to get moving,” Butler said. “I want to parade through Nashville or Birmingham or one of those places. And if I hear some Confederate asshole yell, ‘Freedom!’-well, I want to pull out my.45 and blow his fucking head off.”

He sounded altogether matter-of-fact about it, the way a U.S. white man would have. But for the color of his skin, he might as well have been a U.S. white man. He seemed as sure of his place in the world and as comfortable with it as any white man, whether from the USA or the CSA. Cincinnatus, whom life had left forever betwixt and between, envied him for that.

He climbed into the cab of his truck, slammed the door, turned the key in the ignition, and put the beast in gear. South and east he rolled, back toward Findlay. No shellfire fell on the road this time. U.S. guns, or maybe dive bombers, had silenced the Confederate batteries that were shelling it. Cincinnatus approved. Unlike Douglass Butler, he didn’t want to use his.45 for anything. He had it. He could use it if he had to. But he didn’t want to.

What if Jake Featherston was right in front of you? He glanced over to the pistol. Well, you could make exceptions for everything. Dream as he would, though, he didn’t expect to be sharing a diner with the President of the CSA any time soon.

When he rolled into Findlay, he got waved through the town. “What’s goin’ on?” he called to a soldier with wigwag flags.

“We broke through again, that’s what,” the white man answered. “They need their shit farther forward.”

“I like that,” Cincinnatus said, and drove on.

Shells were falling not far from the new unloading area, but they’d been falling in Findlay and beyond it only a couple of hours before. The men who hauled crates out of the back of his truck had an air of barely suppressed excitement. They didn’t seem to think the Confederates would be able to slow this latest push.

Do Jesus, let ’em be right, Cincinnatus thought. That Ohio should be liberated didn’t matter so much in and of itself-not to him, anyway. But he could see that U.S. soldiers would have to clear the Confederates out of their own country before they started doing what really did matter-to him, anyway. If the United States were going to lick Jake Featherston, they would have to do it on Featherston’s turf.

Cincinnatus thought about the last time he’d driven trucks full of munitions through Kentucky and Tennessee. He thought about the Confederate diehards who’d shot up his column more than once. Then he thought about U.S. artillery and bombers blowing all those people to kingdom come.

War was a filthy business for everybody, no doubt about it. Cincinnatus wanted a little more filth to come down on the other side. He didn’t think that was too much to ask.

Brigadier General Irving Morrell was a man in a hurry. He always had been, ever since his days as a company commander at the start of the Great War. He took the first position he ever attacked-and he got shot charging with the bayonet when he ran out of ammunition. That taught him an important lesson: like anything else, being in a hurry had its disadvantages.

It also had its advantages, though. Massing barrels and smashing Confederate lines made the CSA say uncle in 1917. At the Barrel Works at Fort Leavenworth after the Great War, Morrell designed a machine with all the features a modern barrel needed: a reduced crew, a powerful engine, a big gun in a turret that turned through 360 degrees, and a wireless set.

He designed it-and he found nobody in the USA much wanted it. The Great War was over, wasn’t it? There’d never be another one, would there? Being a man in a hurry sometimes put you too far ahead not only of the enemy but also of your own side.

By the time it became clear the Great War wouldn’t be the last one after all, the state of the art all over the world had caught up with Morrell’s vision. Germany and Austria-Hungary built barrels incorporating all the features he’d envisioned more than fifteen years earlier. So did France and England and Russia. And so did the Confederate States.

So did the United States, but belatedly and halfheartedly. When the fighting started, Morrell had to try to defend Ohio without enough machines-and without good enough machines. He failed. Even in failure, he alarmed the Confederates. A sniper gave him an oak-leaf cluster for his Purple Heart and put him on the shelf for weeks.

Returning to duty, he didn’t have much luck in Virginia, a narrow land bristling with fortifications. But he was the architect of the U.S. thrust that cut off, surrounded, and destroyed the Confederate army that fought its way into Pittsburgh. Now the armored force he led was driving west through Ohio. He knew exactly what he wanted to do. If, somewhere south of Columbus, his force could meet up with the one pushing southeast from northwestern Ohio and Indiana, they would trap all the Confederates to the north of them in another pocket.

He didn’t think Jake Featherston could afford to lose one army. He knew damn well the President of the CSA couldn’t afford to lose two. What could be better, then, than giving Jake exactly what he didn’t want?

Right this minute, Morrell was bivouacked with his lead barrels atop Mount Pleasant, in Lancaster, Ohio. The 250-foot sandstone rise looked down on the whole town. It had not lived up to its name. Not being fools, the Confederates put an observation post and several artillery batteries atop the rise, and protected them with pillboxes and machine-gun nests.

Clearing them out was a slow, bloody, expensive job. Morrell believed in bypassing enemy strongpoints wherever he could, letting slower-moving infantry clean up in the armor’s wake. Some strongpoints, though, were too strong to bypass. This, unfortunately, was one of them.

Dive bombers helped pound it into submission. Several 105s sprawled in the snow, knocked ass over teakettle by 500-pound bombs. Dead soldiers in butternut lay there, too. Some of them wore white camouflage smocks over their uniforms, which struck Morrell as a good idea. Good idea or not, it didn’t save them. Along with soot, their blood streaked the snow.

Crows and a couple of turkey vultures were feeding on the bodies. Standing up in his barrel’s cupola, Morrell waved his arms and yelled, “Yaaah!” A few of the birds flew away. Most of them ignored him.

The gunner tapped him on the leg. “What the hell, sir?” Corporal Al Bergeron said plaintively. “You scared the crap out of me there.”

“Sorry, Frenchy,” Morrell answered. Bergeron was a good man and a good gunner-maybe not quite so good as Michael Pound, who was one of a kind in several different ways, but damn good just the same. Morrell explained why he made his horrible noise.

“Oh.” Bergeron thought about that for a little while. Then he said, “Yeah, those damn things are filthy, all right. Tell you one thing, though: I’m glad they’re chowing down on Featherston’s fuckers and not on us.”

“Me, too,” Morrell said, though he knew the carrion birds didn’t care whether their suppers came wrapped in butternut or green-gray. For that matter, the crows and vultures feasted on dead civilians, too.

“What’s it look like off to the west?” Bergeron asked.

Before answering, Morrell scanned the way ahead with binoculars. Visibility wasn’t everything he wished it were, but he could see enough to get some idea of what was going on. “Sure looks like they’re pulling back,” he said.

Corporal Bergeron summed up his reaction to that in two words: “Well, shit.”

“You said a mouthful, Frenchy.” Morrell really had hoped he could cut off as many Confederates with this thrust as he had in and around Pittsburgh. Then, Jake Featherston forbade his men to withdraw. Morrell had hoped he would do it again. But evidently he was able to learn from experience. Too bad, Morrell thought. The Confederates were heading south in anything that would roll: truck convoys, barrels, commandeered civilian motorcars. Bombers and artillery and saboteurs did everything they could to knock the railroads out of action, but Ohio had such a dense net of tracks that it wasn’t easy. Every soldier, every barrel, every gun, every truck that got out now was a soldier, a barrel, a gun, a truck the USA would have to put out of action later on.

Morrell scanned the horizon again. He knew he was being foolish, but he did it anyhow. If he could have seen the U.S. forces coming down from the northwest, the Confederates would have been in even worse trouble than they really were. When he sighed, the vapor threatened to cloud the field glasses’ lenses. That western column wasn’t so strong or so swift as this one. Even so…

“We get the country put back together again,” Frenchy Bergeron said.

You didn’t need to be a general to see that; a noncom would do just fine. The Confederates’ armored thrust had carried them all the way from the Ohio River up to Sandusky. They cut the United States in half. For more than a year and a half, goods and men moved from east to west or west to east by air (risky), on the waters of the Great Lakes (also risky, with C.S. airplanes always on the prowl), and over the Canadian roads and railroads north of the lakes (of limited capacity, and vulnerable to sabotage even before the Canucks rebelled).

“It’ll be better,” Morrell agreed. It probably wouldn’t be a whole lot better any time soon. The Confederates were professionally competent. They would have done their best to wreck the east-west highways and railroad lines they were now sullenly abandoning. Putting the roads and railways back into action wouldn’t happen overnight, especially since C.S. bombers would go right on visiting northern Ohio.

But now the Confederates were reacting to what Morrell and his countrymen did. For the first year of the war and more, the enemy had the United States back on their heels. The CSA called the tune. No more.

As Morrell watched, artillery rounds began falling near the Confederate convoy. The first few shells missed the road, bursting in front of or behind it. The trucks sped up. If they could get out of trouble…But they couldn’t, not fast enough. A round hit the road. The convoy had to slow down to go onto the shoulder. And then a truck got hit, and began to burn.

That was all Morrell needed to see. He was commanding a large, complex operation. But he was also a fighting man himself. When he saw trucks in trouble, he wanted to give them more.

His barrel carried a large, complicated wireless set. He could talk with his fellow armored units, with artillery, with infantry, or with bombers and fighters. He didn’t want to, not here. He used the company circuit any barrel commander might have clicked to: “We’ve got a Confederate convoy stalled on the road a few miles west. Let’s go get ’em!”

Along with the others nearby, his own machine rumbled down off Mount Pleasant. Even after giving up the high ground, they had no trouble tracking their quarry: the pyre from that one burning truck-and maybe from more by now-guided them straight to it.

They met a warm reception when they got there. The Confederates had to know trouble was on the way. They didn’t stay in the trucks waiting around to get shot up. Some of them made their way south on foot. And others had manhandled an antibarrel gun into position, and opened up on the U.S. machines as soon as they came into range.

The Confederates hit one, too, fortunately with a round that glanced off instead of penetrating. “Front!” Morrell said.

“Identified!” Frenchy Bergeron answered. “HE!” the gunner called to the loader. The barrel stopped. He fired a couple of high-explosive shells at the gun. He wasn’t the only barrel gunner shooting, either. The Confederates serving the cannon had only a small splinter shield to protect them. They soon went down.

Brave bastards, Morrell thought, watching with his head and shoulders out of the cupola. Small-arms fire came his way, but not a lot of it. He ignored it with the stoicism of a man who’d known worse. One bullet was all he needed to make this as bad as it could be, but he didn’t think about that.

Then something different happened. A projectile trailing smoke and flame seemed to come out of nowhere. It slammed into a U.S. barrel and set it afire. Morrell couldn’t see if any of the men got out. He didn’t think so.

“What the fuck was that?” Bergeron must have seen it through the gunsight.

“I’ll be goddamned if I know,” Morrell answered.

He didn’t have to wait long. A couple of minutes later, another one of those darts of fire lanced out to incinerate a U.S. barrel. “It’s some kind of rocket, like on the Fourth of July,” Frenchy Bergeron said. “How the hell did they come up with that?”

“How? I don’t know, but they sure did.” Morrell ducked down into the turret. “Did you see where they’re shooting it from?”

“Yes, sir,” the gunner answered. “Behind that stone fence there near the road.”

“All right. If they pop up again, try and shoot them before they can let go with it. I’ve got to get on the horn to my people.” He flipped to the circuit that would connect him to senior armor officers. “The Confederates have a portable antibarrel device, something an infantryman can use to knock out a machine at a couple of hundred yards. I say again, a foot soldier can use this thing to knock out a barrel at a couple of hundred yards.”

Life suddenly got more complicated. If foot soldiers really could fight back against armor without the suicidal impulse required to fling a Featherston Fizz…We need something like that ourselves, Morrell thought.

The coaxial machine gun chattered. “Got the son of a bitch!” Bergeron said.

Plainly, the C.S. rocket was new. Plainly, the Confederates here didn’t have many rounds. Just as plainly, the damn thing worked. And how many factories would start turning it out as fast as they could? Morrell swore. Yes, life was a lot more complicated all at once.

When Jake Featherston wanted to fly into Nashville, his bodyguards didn’t just have kittens. They had puppies and lambs and probably baby elephants, too. Their chief was a group leader-the Freedom Party guards’ equivalent of a major general-named Hiram McCullough. “Mr. President,” he said, “your airplane could crash.”

Featherston scowled at him. “My train could derail, too, if I go that way,” he growled.

“Yes, sir,” Group Leader McCullough agreed stolidly. That gave Featherston’s ever-ready anger no good place to light. McCullough went on, “The other thing that could happen is, the damnyankees could shoot you down. The country needs you too much to let you take the chance.”

Without false modesty, Jake knew the country needed him, too. He couldn’t think of anyone else with the driving will to hold the CSA together if anything did happen to him. That was only the second half of what McCullough said, though. As for the first…“How could the damnyankees shoot me down? They won’t know I’m in the air till I’ve landed.”

“Sir, you don’t know that for sure. Neither do I.” McCullough had a round, red face pitted with acne scars. He was good at looking worried, as a bodyguard should be. He looked very worried now. “We don’t know for a fact how many of our codes the Yankees can read. We don’t know for a fact that they don’t have spies who’d pass on where you’re going and when. If you give the orders, I’ll follow ’em. But do you want to take a chance you don’t have to?”

Damn you, Jake thought. Since turning fifty-and since surviving two assassination tries, one by his own guards-he was more careful about his own safety. No one could question his courage, not after the record he’d racked up in the Great War. However much he wanted to, he couldn’t deny that Group Leader McCullough had a point.

“All right, Hiram,” he said. “I’ll take the goddamn train.”

“Thank you, Mr. President!” McCullough said in glad surprise. Those doleful features hardly seemed able to contain the smile that lit them now.

Featherston held up a bony hand. “Don’t thank me yet. We’ll keep the train real quiet-I mean real quiet. What you put out through the regular secure channels is that I am going to fly. Send my regular pilot, send my regular airplane, give it the regular fighter escort. Put somebody who looks like me on it. If the Yankees jump it, you win. If they don’t, I’ll damn well fly when I feel like it. You got that?”

“Yes, sir,” McCullough said. “I’ll take care of it, just like you want me to.” Just about everyone said that to the President of the CSA. It was what he liked to hear most. McCullough got to his feet. “Freedom!”

“Freedom!” Jake echoed.

Two days later, an armored limousine took someone who looked like him from the ruins of the Gray House to the airport outside Richmond. Escorted by Hound Dogs, his personal transport took off for Nashville. With no ceremony at all, Jake went to the train station and headed west in a Pullman car.

He got to the capital of Tennessee six hours later than he expected to; U.S. bombs had knocked out a bridge. He was glad he wasn’t scheduled to speak till that evening. Delaying his talk because of what the enemy did would be embarrassing.

Hiram McCullough went to Nashville a day ahead of him to make sure security was tight. The group leader met Jake at the train station. As soon as he could, he took Featherston aside. In a low voice, he said, “Mr. President, two squadrons of Yankee fighters jumped your airplane before it got out of Virginia. They shot it down, and they shot down three of the Hound Dogs with it, too.”

“Jesus Christ!” Jake exploded.

“Yes, sir,” McCullough said. “I’m mighty glad you stayed on the ground, Mr. President.” That was I told you so, but Jake didn’t care. He was glad, too.

He said so. He didn’t see how he could avoid it. Then he asked, “How the hell are those bastards picking up our codes?”

“Don’t know, sir,” McCullough answered. “I’m going to be looking at that, though-you better believe I will. And I’ll tell you something else, too: I won’t be the only one, either.”

“Better not be,” Featherston said. “Dammit, I’m gonna have to do more talking with Clarence Potter.” Potter was smart-sometimes too damn smart for his own good, but smart. And a breach like this would make him focus all of his formidable brainpower on it.

Unless he’s the one who fed the damnyankees the codes in the first place. In Jake Featherston’s shoes, you worried about everybody all the time, and for every possible reason. But Featherston couldn’t make himself believe Clarence Potter would sell the CSA down the river. Potter didn’t love him; he’d known that for many years. But the Intelligence officer was a Confederate patriot. If you didn’t understand that, you didn’t understand anything about him.

“I brought an armored car to the station, sir, to take you to the hotel,” McCullough said. “Just in case.”

“Thanks.” Featherston couldn’t deny that that made sense. If the Yankees knew he was on the way to Nashville, they might have people here who would try to strike at him. Of course, they might also be thinking they’d just killed him-in which case they were all probably out getting drunk and trying to lay their secretaries. He let out a nasty chuckle. Before long, they’d know he was still alive and kicking, all right.

The armored car looked impressive as hell. It had six big tires with cleated treads. Its angles were harsh and military. It sported a barrel-like turret with a cannon and a coaxial machine gun. But factories weren’t making very many of them these days, and most of the ones that did get made were used against rebellious Negroes, not against the damnyankees. Armored cars made tolerable scout vehicles. Their steel sides kept out small-arms fire. But they were horribly vulnerable to any kind of cannon, and even with six wheels and all-wheel drive they weren’t as good away from roads as tracked machines were.

This one, though, was fine to get him to the Hermitage Hotel. He peered out at Nashville through firing slits and periscopes. The city hadn’t been bombed nearly so hard as Richmond had. It was farther from U.S. airstrips than the capital, and not so vital a target. But it had suffered, too.

So much to rebuild when this is over, Jake thought. A scowl made his rawboned features even harsher than they were already. As long as the United States needed to put more back together, it didn’t matter.

Everybody at the Hermitage Hotel was nervous, though Featherston had stayed there on earlier visits to Nashville. The manager said, “I hope the suite will be satisfactory,” about three times in the space of two minutes.

“Don’t worry about it. It’ll be fine,” Jake told him. The manager had to be scared he’d get skinned alive if the rooms weren’t fancy enough. That only proved he didn’t know the President of the CSA. Jake liked Habana cigars and good whiskey, but that was as far as he went along those lines. He hadn’t got into politics hoping for riches and luxury. Power drove him, nothing else.

He didn’t stay at the Hermitage very long: just long enough to freshen up after the train trip. Then he went across the street to the Nashville Memorial Auditorium, a ponderous concrete building that went up after the Great War.

He didn’t have a full house in the auditorium, but he didn’t care. This speech was for the wireless and the newsreels, not for the people actually in the hall. When it was filmed, the place would look full whether it was or not. Saul Goldman didn’t hire cameramen who didn’t know what they were doing.

“I’m Jake Featherston, and I’m here to tell you the truth.” He’d been opening with that line ever since he discovered the wireless. That was twenty years ago now. He found it hard to believe, but it was true. When he said it, he believed it. His speeches wouldn’t have worked half as well if he didn’t.

“The truth is, we are going to win this war!” When he said that, the Party stalwarts and fat cats in the Memorial Auditorium started yelling as if it were going out of style. Maybe he inspired them. Maybe they were scared shitless and needed a pat on the fanny to make ’em feel better. If they did, he would give them one.

“We are going to win,” he repeated. “They can’t beat us, because we damn well won’t quit! We’ll never quit, not while we’ve got one free white man who can stand on his own two feet and aim a rifle at the enemy.” More applause came echoing back from the ceiling. The noise made Jake’s heart beat faster. Talking in a wireless studio was one thing. Talking in front of a living, breathing, sweating crowd was something else, something better, something hotter.

“Truth is, the Freedom Party’s had the right idea for twenty-five years now,” Jake went on. “And if an idea’s right to begin with, it will take up arms and struggle in this world. And once it does, nobody can beat it. Nobody, you hear? Every time someone persecutes it, that only makes it stronger!”

“Freedom!” somebody in the audience yelled. An instant later, everyone took up the cry. It washed over Jake Featherston. He scowled toward the north. If the damnyankees thought the Confederate States would fold up and die because things hadn’t gone perfectly in Pennsylvania and Ohio, they could damn well think again.

“We’re in this for the long haul!” he shouted. “This isn’t any ordinary war, and everybody needs to remember it. This is the kind of fight that will shape the new millennium. A war like this doesn’t come along every day. It shakes the world once in a thousand years. We’re on a crusade here, a crusade for-”

“Freedom!” The roar was louder this time.

Featherston nodded. “That’s right, friends. We can’t quit now. We won’t quit now, either. If the Confederate people give up, they won’t deserve anything better than what they get. If they give up, I won’t be sorry for them if God lets them down.” He paused to let that sink in, then softly asked, “But we won’t give up, will we? We’ll never give up, will we?”

“No!” No hesitation, no backsliding. If they were there, he would hear them. As always, the Confederate States were going where he took them. And he knew where that was.

“We’ll buckle down, then,” he said. “We’ll work hard at home. We’ll whip the damnyankees yet. For every ton of bombs they drop on us, we’ll drop ten tons on their heads, same as we’ve been doing all along. And we’ll never get stabbed in the back again, on account of we’re putting our own house in order, by God!”

That drew more frantic applause. Most of Nashville’s Negroes were already in camps. Lots of Negroes went into camps in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas. They went in, but they didn’t come out. That suited most of the whites in the CSA just fine. And if the Confederate States of America weren’t a white man’s country, then there was no such thing, not anywhere in the world.

Since the war started, wireless broadcasting was a tricky business. The USA and the CSA jammed each other’s stations as hard as they could. As often as not, snarls of static strangled and distorted music and comedies as well as news.

But that wasn’t the only reason the tune coming out of the wireless set in Flora Blackford’s office sounded strange to her. Satchmo and the Rhythm Aces weren’t an ordinary U.S. combo. They were colored men who’d escaped to the USA after being sent north into Ohio to entertain Confederate troops. Nobody in the United States played music like “New Orleans Jump.” If the Negroes weren’t minor heroes because of their daring getaway, they never would have got airtime for anything with such peculiar syncopations. As things were, they had a minor hit on their hands.

Congresswoman Blackford was happy for them. She’d met Satchmo and his less memorable bandmates. They were talented men. To her, they were a symbol of everything the Confederate States were wasting with their constant war against the Negro.

She clucked unhappily. To her countrymen, Satchmo and the Rhythm Aces were a curiosity, nothing more. Most people in the USA didn’t want to hear about Negroes, didn’t want anything to do with them, and didn’t want to be told what the Confederates were doing to them. She’d tried her best to make her countrymen pay attention. Her best wasn’t good enough.

“New Orleans Jump” struck her as fitting background music for what she was reading: the transcript of Jake Featherston’s recent speech in Nashville. She’d got it from the War Department. The captain who gave it to her seemed angry that he had to.

Flora wondered what that was all about. She didn’t think the young officer had any reason to be angry at her personally. She’d never set eyes on him before. She wasn’t trying to cut off funding-who would, these days? You gave the Army and the Navy what they said they needed, and you hoped they found ways to shoot all the money at the enemy.

So why was the captain steaming, then? She picked up the telephone and called the Assistant Secretary of War, who was somewhere between a conspirator and a friend. “Hello, Flora,” Franklin Roosevelt said genially. “What can I do for you today?”

“A captain just brought me a copy of Featherston’s latest speech,” Flora said.

“Jake’s a son of a bitch, isn’t he?” Roosevelt said. “Pardon my French.”

“There’s certainly no give in him-as if we didn’t know that,” Flora said. “But that isn’t why I’m calling, or not exactly, anyhow. This captain seemed to be doing a slow burn, and I wondered why. It’s not like I ever met him before.”

“Oh. I think I can tell you that on the telephone,” Roosevelt said. “It’s not as if the Confederates don’t already know it. Dear Jake gave that speech in Nashville, right?”

“Yes.” Flora found herself nodding, though of course Franklin Roosevelt couldn’t see her. He had a gift for inspiring intimacy. If infantile paralysis hadn’t left him in a wheelchair, he might have tried to follow his cousin Theodore into the White House. And he was a solid Socialist, too, unlike Theodore the Democrat. “What about it?” Flora went on.

“This about it: we knew Featherston was going to Nashville. We hoped we’d arranged things so he wouldn’t get there.” Roosevelt sighed. “Obviously, we didn’t. He’s a suspicious so-and-so, and he dodged the bullet. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s why your captain was steaming. I’m steaming, too, to tell you the truth.”

“Oh.” Flora nodded again. “Well, now that I know, so am I. If we could bump him off…”

“Wouldn’t it be lovely?” Franklin Roosevelt said.

“It sure would.” Flora was sure she and the Assistant Secretary of War shared the same beatific vision: the Confederate States of America thrashing around like a headless snake if Jake Featherston got it in the neck. She had no idea who would or could replace Featherston if he got it in the neck. She doubted the Confederates had any more idea than she did. Jake Featherston made the CSA tick. If he wasn’t there, wouldn’t the country stop ticking?

“The other bad thing about it is, now they know we’ve broken some of their codes,” Roosevelt said. “They’ll change them, and that will complicate our lives for a while.”

Till we break them again, he had to mean. “Too bad,” Flora said. “Too bad all the way around, in fact. Thanks for letting me know. That does make me pretty sure the captain wasn’t mad at me personally, anyhow.”

“Always a relief,” Roosevelt agreed. “The last thing anybody wants or needs is a secret unadmirer.”

“Er-yes.” Flora tasted the phrase. “But it’s a shame Featherston’s unadmirers here didn’t stay secret enough.”

“Well, so it is,” the Assistant Secretary of War said. “The Confederates didn’t break off the flight because they’re reading our codes. I think they put a decoy on it because one of their security people got jumpy. The good ones do, from everything I’ve heard, and Lord knows Featherston needs good ones.”

“Plenty of people on both sides of the border who want to kill him, all right,” Flora said. “Did you notice inflation is coming back to the Confederate States?”

“No.” Roosevelt was suddenly and sharply interested. After the Great War, the Confederate dollar collapsed; when things were at their worst, enjoying a beer took billions. “What do you mean? It would be wonderful if their economy went down the drain again.”

But Flora didn’t mean that, however much she wished she did. “Not what I was thinking,” she said sadly. “When the war was new, though, Featherston promised to drop three tons of bombs on our heads for every ton we landed on the CSA. Now he’s up to ten tons.”

“Oh.” Franklin Roosevelt laughed. “I’d call that deflation myself-as his spirits go down, his threats go up. He was lying then, and he’s still lying now. The Confederates weren’t that far ahead at the start of things, and they’re behind us now. We’re landing more on them than they are on us-quite a bit more, as a matter of fact.”

“Good,” Flora said, wondering how he knew. If she asked him, he’d probably tell her it was a very precise statistic he’d just made up. Odds were neither side knew exactly how much it was getting and receiving. She asked a different question instead: “How are things out West?”

“They’re doing quite well.” Roosevelt sounded enthusiastic, as he often did. “It really does look like General Dowling will take Lubbock away from the Confederates. If he does, we may proclaim the state of Houston again. That will give the people in west Texas something to flabble about-something to fight among themselves about.”

“No one-except maybe them-would be sorry about that,” Flora said. “It would also give him a base to go after Camp Determination.” The camps where the Confederates systematically got rid of their Negroes sickened her as nothing else ever did.

“Well, maybe.” Franklin Roosevelt didn’t sound so enthusiastic about that. He spelled out his reasons: “It’s farther from Lubbock to the camp than it is from the border to Lubbock, quite a bit farther. Those are the wide open spaces out there. And detaching men from more urgent things farther east may not be easy, either.”

Flora could have argued that nothing was more urgent than saving the lives of untold thousands of innocent human beings. She could have, but she knew the Assistant Secretary of War wouldn’t pay any attention if she did. He would say that wouldn’t win the war, and winning the war was the most urgent item on the agenda. She would have a devil of a time showing he was wrong, too. So, again, she took a different tack: “How are things farther west than that?”

Had Roosevelt started giving her chapter and verse about the skirmishes on the border between New Mexico and Sonora-and there’d never been more than skirmishes on that border, even though the war was heading towards its second birthday-she would have got angry. But he didn’t. “That seems to be going as well as expected, too,” he said.

“I’m glad to hear it.” Flora didn’t expect to hear anything more, not over the telephone. The project centered on Hanford, Washington, sounded like something from the pages of a pulp magazine with bugeyed monsters and scantily clad girls on the cover. In fact, though, someone had told her that those magazines had a lot of subscribers in Hanford-they were much more popular with scientists and engineers than with the general public. She hoped the Confederacy’s spymasters didn’t know that.

“I do think we’re making progress. I really do,” Roosevelt said.

“Here’s hoping.” Flora didn’t think she’d ever heard of uranium till after the war began. Now she knew there was more than one kind. If the 235 could be separated from the 238, or if the 238 could somehow make some new element altogether-it all sounded more like medieval alchemy than science-the bombs that resulted might blow whole cities off the map. With luck, those would be Confederate cities. Without luck…“Any word on how they’re doing with this on the other side of the line?”

“Well, they do seem to be trying.” The Assistant Secretary of War sounded less jaunty than was his wont.

Fear clogged Flora’s throat. If the cities blown off the map belonged to the USA, Jake Featherston would win his war in spite of the disasters the Confederates had suffered in Pennsylvania and Ohio. “What can we do about that?” she asked. “Can we do anything?”

“We won’t let them get away with it if we can possibly stop them, I promise you that,” Roosevelt said.

“Good,” Flora said, before she asked herself how good it really was. What had Roosevelt promised? To stop the CSA from building a uranium bomb? No. He’d promised to try to stop the Confederates from building one. Of course the United States would do that. Flora found one more question: “What can they do to stop us?”

“They haven’t tried anything yet,” Roosevelt said-another answer that wasn’t an answer. He went on, “They may have done some reconnaissance-we’re not sure about that. If they did, they won’t be able to do it again. We’ve tightened up since the last time we think they came around.”

“Why weren’t things tight right from the beginning?” Flora admired her own restraint. She didn’t raise her voice at all, no matter how much she felt like yelling her head off.

“Because we were asleep at the switch.” Roosevelt could be disarmingly frank. “We aren’t any more. We won’t be, either. That’s about the best I can tell you, Flora.”

“All right,” she said, and hoped it was. “I’m sure we’ll do everything we can.” She said her good-byes then. She hoped the USA bombed the Confederates’ uranium-producing plants to hell and gone. She hoped the CSA didn’t do the same to the one the United States had. Was such hope enough? The only answer that occurred to her was painfully cliched, which made it no less true. She’d have to wait and see.