Abner Dowling walked the mayor of Snyder, Texas, through what was left of Camp Determination. The mayor was a plump, middle-aged fellow named Jethro Gwynn. He walked with a limp and a stick; he’d fought for the CSA in the Great War. “You say you didn’t know what was going on here?” Dowling growled.
“That’s a fact, sir,” Gwynn answered. “All the barbed wire and everything…They kept people out, you know.” He sounded earnest and persuasive. Dowling didn’t believe him for a minute.
Neither did Major Angelo Toricelli. “Well, what did you think was going on when all those trains stopped here? People got off those trains. Thousands and thousands and thousands of them got off. Nobody ever got on. Didn’t that kind of make you wonder?”
“No, sir,” Gwynn said blandly. “All them trains went through Snyder sealed up tight. Couldn’t prove by me they had people in ’em.”
“What are we going to do with this lying son of a bitch, sir?” Dowling’s adjutant demanded.
“Here, now. You got no cause to talk about me like that,” Jethro Gwynn said. “Whatever went on here, it was none of my damn business, and I didn’t ask no questions.”
Major Toricelli’s hand dropped to his pistol. “For three cents cash I’d blow your lying brains out. It’s more than you’re worth, too.”
“Nobody who lives in town paid much attention to this place,” the mayor of Snyder insisted. “It was just here, that’s all.”
That was too much for General Dowling. “All right, Mr. Gwynn,” he said. “You’re going to come for a little ride with me.”
“Where are we going?” Gwynn asked, sudden apprehension in his voice.
“Don’t worry-it’s not far,” Dowling answered. “And even if it were, you’d be smart to come along. I bet if I looked in my pocket I could find three cents for Major Toricelli.” His hands folded into fists. He wanted to beat the snot out of this Texan, the kind of urge he hadn’t had since his West Point days. “Get moving. You think you’re unhappy now that the United States are here, you give me any trouble and you’ll find out you don’t know jack shit about unhappy-not yet you don’t, anyway. But you will.”
He must have been persuasive. Without another word, Jethro Gwynn walked back to the command car that had brought him out from Snyder. The driver and the other two soldiers waiting in the vehicle glared at him. Dowling didn’t think he’d need to give them three cents. If the mayor got even a little out of line, he could have an unfortunate accident for free.
“Take us to that field, Clancy,” Dowling told the driver. “You know the one I’m talking about?”
“Oh, yes, sir. I sure do,” Clancy said. The motor was still running. The driver put the command car in gear. It rolled along a well-paved highway-a remarkably well-paved highway, seeing that it ended in the middle of nowhere.
The wind was blowing from the field. Dowling’s nose wrinkled. So did Jethro Gwynn’s. “Maybe we don’t need to go any further,” the mayor of Snyder said.
“Shut up,” Major Toricelli said, his voice hard and flat.
“I think we’ll keep going,” Dowling said. “We’re almost there anyhow, eh, Clancy?” He gave Gwynn a sour stare. “Clancy and I have been here before. Have you, Mr. Mayor?”
“No!” Gwynn said. “Christ, no!”
“I wonder why not,” Dowling said. Jethro Gwynn didn’t answer. Nothing was the best thing he could have said, but it wasn’t nearly good enough. The command car passed through a barbed-wire gate a barrel might have flattened. To the driver, Dowling added, “Stop by the closest trench-the open one.”
“Yes, sir,” Clancy said, and he did.
“Well, let’s get out of here and have a look around, shall we?” Dowling descended from the command car. He waited for the mayor to join him. Plainly, the mayor didn’t want to. Just as plainly, the savage expressions the U.S. soldiers wore told him he had no choice. Looking as glum as a man possibly could, he got down, too. Major Toricelli followed him.
“Come over here, God damn you.” Toricelli shoved him toward that trench, which hadn’t been covered over like the rest. “Take a good look. Then tell me you didn’t know what the hell Camp Determination was up to.”
“Please…” Jethro Gwynn said, but nobody wanted to listen to him. Feet dragging in the dirt, he scuffled his way forward.
Even in October, curtains of flies buzzed above the trench. Crows and ravens and vultures flew away as the men approached, but they didn’t go far. The rations were too good for them to want to leave. The stench was overpowering, unbelievable; it seemed thick enough to make the air resistive to motion. Dowling knew it would cling to his uniform, his skin, his hair. He also knew he would have to bathe several times to get rid of it.
“Go on,” he said harshly. “Take a good look.”
Gwynn gulped. How many Negroes-men, women, children-lay in this trench, all bloated and stinking and flyblown and pecked by scavenger birds? Thousands, surely. The trench was long and deep and about two-thirds full. Had the Confederates not pulled out of Camp Determination and blown the place up, they would have filled the trench with corpses and then scraped out another trench, closer to the entrance, and started in on that one, too. They’d set this up very efficiently.
“Well?” Dowling said. “What do you think, Mr. Gwynn? How do you like it?”
“I had no idea,” the mayor of Snyder gasped, and then he leaned forward and threw up. He was neat about it; he missed his shoes. Wheezing, coughing, spitting, he went on, “Honest to God, I didn’t.”
“You lying sack of shit.” Dowling pointed to the closed trench beyond this open one, and then to the next closed trench, and then to the next and the next. “What did you think they were doing here? Running a hospital?”
“I didn’t ask any questions,” Gwynn said. “I didn’t want to know.”
“That sounds a little more like the truth, anyway-not much, but a little,” Major Toricelli said.
“Not enough,” Dowling said. “Nowhere close to enough. Come on. Let’s go back to the command car.”
“Can we head back to town?” the mayor asked eagerly.
“Not yet, Charlie,” Dowling said. After they got in, he told Clancy, “Go on all the way up to the first trench.”
“Yes, sir,” the driver said.
Again, Jethro Gwynn didn’t want to get out. This time, Major Toricelli gave him a shove. “We had to look at this, asshole,” he said. “You damn well can, too.”
Bulldozers had scraped off the dirt from part of the first trench. The bodies in there were a couple of years old. They were mostly bones, with rotting clothes and bits of skin and hair here and there. Halloween in hell might have looked like this.
“They’ve been doing it ever since this camp opened up, for the last two years or so. How many bodies are here all told, do you think?” Dowling said. “And you have the brass to try and tell me you didn’t know what was going on? God, what a shitty excuse for a liar you are.”
“What a shitty excuse for a human being,” Toricelli said.
Gwynn puked again. He didn’t try denying things any more, though. Maybe that was progress.
“And do you know what the best part is?” Major Toricelli said. “Once your smokes here were dead, the guards had people who went into their mouths with pliers or whatever the hell and yanked out all their gold fillings. Waste not, want not, I guess.”
Gwynn looked revolted in a new and different way. “You’re making that up. Nobody would do such a thing.”
“It’s the God’s truth, Mr. Gwynn.” Abner Dowling held up his right hand as if taking an oath. “So help me. We had Graves Registration people put on gas masks and look at the bodies up close. They didn’t find any dental gold. None-not a crown, not a filling, not a bridge. Nothing. What they did find was lots of dead colored people with teeth yanked out or teeth broken to get the gold from them. And how do you like that?”
Had Gwynn looked any greener, Dowling would have been tempted to mow him. The mayor of Snyder said, “I swear on my mother’s name, General, and by our Lord Jesus Christ, I never knew nothin’ about that. Nothin’. Pulling teeth? That’s…just sick.” He bent over and retched some more. This time, he had nothing in his stomach to bring up.
The dry heaves were nasty. Dowling watched without sympathy till Gwynn’s spasm finally ended. “So you really did know they were killing off Negroes at the camp, then?” he said.
“Well, I had a pretty good notion they were,” Jethro Gwynn admitted in a ragged whisper. “I didn’t ask any questions, though. None of my business, I reckoned.”
“You passed by on the other side of the road, like the priest in the Good Book,” Dowling said in a voice like iron.
By then, Gwynn was in no shape to quarrel. “I guess maybe I did.”
“I’ve got one more question for you. Then I’ll take you back to town,” Dowling said. “Why don’t you like grubbing gold out of Negroes’ mouths once they’re dead? They don’t need it any more then. Isn’t killing ’em what’s really wrong?”
“You know, I never looked at it that way,” the mayor of Snyder said seriously. “I mean, they’re just a pack of rebels and troublemakers. But this…” He gulped. “It’s different when you see it with your own eyes.”
“You liked the idea. You didn’t want to know what it meant, that’s all. Or have you got the nerve to tell me I’m wrong?” Dowling asked.
“No, that’s a fact, a true fact,” Gwynn said. “You think about gettin’ rid of niggers and you think, Hell, country’d be better off without ’em. You don’t reckon they’re-people, or anything.”
“Well, what the hell are they, then?” Dowling demanded. When Jethro Gwynn didn’t answer the question, he did it himself: “They’re dead, that’s what. And I bet the worst of ’em has a better hope of heaven than you do, Mr. Gwynn. Come on, damn you.” He shoved the mayor of Snyder toward the command car.
Gwynn didn’t say anything as Clancy drove him back to town. The U.S. soldier let him off in front of his real-estate agency. The mayor fled inside and slammed the door behind him, as if that would keep Dowling and his men from coming back.
Having shown Jethro Gwynn what Camp Determination was all about, Dowling grabbed Snyder’s leading (and only) banker, two attorneys, an accountant, and a doctor. With a happy-for him, anyhow-afterthought, he also grabbed their wives. He took them out to the camp together in a deuce-and-a-half. They all denied they’d had any idea what it was doing.
“I thought you might say that,” he told them.
The truck driver drove them to the mass graves. They turned pale even before the stink started filling the back of the truck. All but one of them vomited at the first trench. Two women fainted. So did one of the lawyers. The doctor passed out when he heard about taking dental gold from the corpses.
“We ought to bring the whole town through here, sir,” Major Toricelli said on the way back to Snyder.
“By God, I’m tempted,” Dowling said. “Maybe I will.”
His own headquarters were well upwind from the mass grave. He bathed and bathed that night, and still smelled, or thought he smelled, the stench of death clinging to him.
His telephone rang early the next morning. The accountant in Snyder had shot his wife and three children, then turned the pistol on himself. Another call came in a few minutes later: the banker’s wife had swallowed rat poison. Then the telephone rang again: Mayor Gwynn had hanged himself from the chandelier in his real-estate office.
“Maybe they’ve got consciences after all, if you kick ’em hard enough,” Dowling said, not altogether without satisfaction. “Who would have imagined that?”
Sergeant Armstrong Grimes hadn’t been in the big fight since the Confederates came north into Ohio. He liked fighting on enemy turf much better. He liked facing the real enemy much better, too. Utah, Canada…It wasn’t that they weren’t dangerous places. His leg still pained him in wet weather like they were having now. No, the point was that he’d got shot in a fight that didn’t matter, a fight that said nothing about who would win the war.
Lieutenant Bassler pointed to a wooded hill in front of Hollysprings, Georgia: a nowhere town that never would have mattered to anyone more than five miles away if it didn’t lie on a road leading south toward Atlanta. “The Confederates are dug in there,” he said. “We’re going to be part of the force that takes the high ground away from them.”
“Yes, sir,” Armstrong said. Cautiously-Confederate snipers were loose in front of the hill-he peered forward. After ducking down again, he added, “Don’t hardly see ’em. They’re probably just waiting for us there under the trees.”
“Afraid you’re right,” the company commander said. “Nothing we can do about it, though.”
“I hope they pound the crap out of the place before they send us in,” Armstrong said. “Will we have a lot of armor support?” He assumed they’d have some, which wouldn’t have been a sure bet in the sideshows where he’d fought before.
“They say we will,” Bassler told him. “Maybe they’re blowing smoke up my ass, but I don’t think so. Softening-up is supposed to start tomorrow at 0500. We go in two hours later.”
“Yes, sir,” Armstrong repeated. He probably wouldn’t have slept late tomorrow anyhow, but now he knew damn well he wouldn’t.
He took the news back to his squad. The men greeted it with the enthusiasm he’d expected. “Hot shit,” Squidface said. “Featherston’s fuckers get another chance to blow my dick off. Just what I’ve been waiting for-yeah, you bet.”
“I wish one of these Confederate broads would blow my dick off,” Woody said. The other soldiers laughed. Then they went back to studying the hill. They might not be strategists, but they’d learned tactics the hard way.
Cal Henderson summed it up: “Taking that place out is liable to be expensive as shit if they’re laying for us under those pines.”
“Air bursts. Lots of air bursts,” Squidface said. Armstrong found himself nodding. You could fuse a shell so it went off as soon as it touched anything at all-a branch, for instance. Air bursts like that slashed the ground below with fragments. Unless you were in a bunker dug into a trench wall, you’d catch hell.
“Grab as many Z’s as you can now,” Armstrong said. “Artillery opens the show at five tomorrow morning. We go in a couple of hours later.”
No, he didn’t get much sleep himself. Having nerves was silly-he couldn’t do anything about whatever would happen soon-but he did all the same. Because he was awake at least as much as he was asleep through the night, he heard barrels rattling up to the start line under cover of darkness. Lieutenant Bassler had got that right, anyhow.
The bombardment started at five on the dot. Star shells lit up the hill bright as day. High-altitude bombers droned overhead, dropped loads of death, and kept on going. They’d blast Atlanta or some other C.S. town, then fly north and land, after dawn let them see what they were doing.
Confederate artillery woke up in a hurry. Quite a few shells fell on the U.S. front line, but none dangerously close to Armstrong’s squad. The men huddled in their foxholes and waited for the brass whistles and the shouts that would send them forward.
It was getting light when U.S. fighter-bombers zoomed in to put the finishing touches on the preliminaries. Armstrong was glad to see them. They could hit targets the high-altitude airplanes were too likely to miss.
“Boy!” Whitey yelled. “They’re beating the holy bejesus out of that place, aren’t they?”
“Here’s hoping,” Armstrong said.
Several soldiers nodded at that. They were like the guys he’d fought beside in Utah: they’d been through the mill, they knew it was no damn good and wouldn’t get any better, and they kept going anyway. He didn’t have anybody just out of the repple-depple in his squad, though the company carried several replacements. He took another look at that hill. By the time they got to the top of it, he feared the squad would need some new men. He hoped to hell it wouldn’t need a new sergeant.
Engines roaring, U.S. barrels clattered forward. Lieutenant Bassler’s whistle shrilled. “Let’s go!” the company commander shouted. “Keep your heads down, don’t bunch up, and I’ll see you when we get there!”
He made a good leader for a front-line outfit. He always sounded confident, and he didn’t send his men anywhere he wouldn’t go himself. Armstrong feared they were going into a meat grinder now. Sometimes that came with the job. He didn’t like it, but he couldn’t help it.
Mortar bombs started falling as soon as the U.S. barrels and soldiers began to advance. Screams followed some of the bursts. Medics scooped up the wounded and carried them back to the rear. Other bursts sounded curiously subdued. They didn’t throw many fragments. Armstrong knew what that meant. Swearing, he shouted, “They’re heaving gas at us!” and put on his mask. One more annoyance, one more inconvenience, in a war that seemed full of nothing else but.
A bullet cracked past him, about belly-button high. He was flat on his belly in the muddy grass before he knew how he’d got there-reflexes really did take over in time of danger. A moment later, he got up and started running again, dodging like a star halfback in a professional league.
Another bullet missed him by not nearly enough. He hit the dirt again. This time, he spotted the muzzle flash. “There!” he yelled, pointing toward a foxhole just in front of the edge of the trees.
With several U.S. soldiers shooting in his direction, the Confederate took his life in his hands whenever he popped up to fire. The men in green-gray worked their way closer to the foxhole. One of them shouted for him to give up. He answered with a burst from his automatic rifle. A shriek said he wounded someone. But two grenades flew into the hole. After that, he didn’t fire any more.
Other Confederates farther back did. Armstrong was glad when he got in among the trees himself. He had plenty of cover then, from upright trunks and from those the U.S. bombardment had knocked over. Not least because of all the havoc the shells and bombs had wreaked, the woods smelled powerfully of pine. The fresh, clean, spicy scent made an odd backdrop for the brutal firefight that went on under the trees.
Armstrong ran past a young Confederate he thought was surely dead-the man had stopped a couple of fragments with his belly and another with his chest. But the soldier in butternut groaned and moved, and almost scared Armstrong out of a year’s growth.
Crouching beside him, Armstrong asked, “How bad is it?”
“I’m done, Yankee,” the enemy soldier answered, gasping against the pain. Blood ran from his mouth and nose.
“You want morphine?” Armstrong said. “I’ll give you some.”
“Already got it.” The kid had to be younger than Armstrong himself, and Armstrong was only twenty. After another gasp, the Confederate said, “Don’t help much.” Armstrong believed him; nothing would help much, not with those wounds.
That led to another question: “Shall I finish you or yell for the medics?”
“I’m done. Told you that.” The soldier took as deep a breath as he could. “Get it over with. No blame on you. I’ll thank you for it.”
“All right, then.” One quick round did the trick. Armstrong hoped somebody on either side would do the job for him if he ever needed it as bad as this kid did. He hurried on, leaving the corpse where it lay.
The Confederates had several machine-gun nests with interlocking fields of fire on the forward slope. You couldn’t approach one without exposing yourself to fire from another. The shelling and bombing hadn’t hurt them; they were made of cement, not sandbags. A soldier with a flamethrower tried to deal with one of them, but a bullet to the fuel tank drenched him in the fire he hoped to shoot. That was a bad way to go; the stench of burnt meat made Armstrong’s stomach heave.
Then two barrels ground close enough to shell a Confederate bunker. After three or four hits, the guns inside stopped shooting back. “Careful!” Armstrong yelled when U.S. soldiers started moving forward again. “They might be playing possum.” They weren’t, but Lieutenant Bassler thumped him on the back for worrying about it.
The barrels methodically smashed three more machine-gun nests. Then one of them hit a mine and threw a track, while a Confederate with a stovepipe rocket set the other one on fire. One last concrete emplacement went on hurling death at the men in green-gray. Two U.S. soldiers with captured Confederate automatic rifles sprayed bullets back. The machine guns focused on them, which was what the men with the automatic rifles had in mind. While they kept the Confederates inside the emplacement busy, another soldier with a flamethrower crept toward it.
A jet of golden fire spat from the nozzle of his infernal device. It shot through the narrow concrete slit that let the machine guns traverse. Armstrong heard screams from inside. They didn’t last long. He got another whiff of that charred-pork smell as he loped past the machine-gun nest. It was dead now, and so were the men inside it.
Up till then, the Confederates resisted fiercely. After the last bunker fell, the spirit seemed to go out of the soldiers in butternut. Instead of dying in place or falling back to fight again from another position, more and more of them tried to surrender. Some succeeded, and went to the rear with hands high and with broad grins of relief on their faces. Others ran into U.S. soldiers in a vengeful mood or just without the time or manpower to bother with prisoners.
Armstrong trotted past a Confederate soldier out in the open who looked to have got shot while trying to give up. That was too bad. If he ever found himself in a mess like this, he hoped the men on the other side would let him yield. But not a damn thing in war came with a money-back guarantee.
He made it to the top of the hill before he quite realized he was there. A couple of mortar teams were launching bombs at Hollysprings to announce that the hill had changed hands. A lieutenant from another company in the regiment was yelling for men to go on and take the town. After the fight on the hill, nobody looked thrilled about rushing into another big one right away.
“You made it, Sarge.” There was Squidface, smoking a Duke some Confederate wouldn’t need any more. He held out the pack to Armstrong without being asked.
“Thanks.” Armstrong took one and leaned close to get it started. He sucked in smoke, then blew it out. It eased the worst of his nerves, anyhow. “Yeah, I’m still here. Looked like they started to lose it a little bit once we took out their machine guns.”
“Uh-huh. I thought so, too,” Squidface said. “Don’t hardly see that with these butternut bastards. Say what you want about ’em, they fight hard.”
“Maybe they see the writing on the wall,” Armstrong said. “Wouldn’t that be something?” He tried to imagine Jake Featherston giving up. The picture didn’t want to form. Neither did one of the United States’ accepting anything less than unconditional surrender and full occupation of the Confederacy.
Artillery shells screamed in from the south. Armstrong hit the dirt and started digging. Sure as hell, the Confederates hadn’t quit yet.
Cassius relaxed in a hut that had once belonged to a sharecropper. The roof leaked. The mattress was ancient and musty. He didn’t much care. Right this minute, nobody seemed to be hunting Gracchus’ guerrilla band. With the damnyankees pounding toward Atlanta, central Georgia had more urgent things to worry about than a few blacks with stolen guns.
Not being dogged wherever he went felt wonderful to Cassius. Gracchus, by contrast, was insulted. “They reckons we don’t count fo’ nothin’,” the guerrilla leader grumbled. “Gots to show ’em we does.”
“Ought to lay up for a while first.” That wasn’t Cassius; it was a scarred veteran named Pyrrhus. “Rest and relax while we can.”
Gracchus shook his head. “They shippin’ all kinds o’ shit up toward the no’th. We hit some o’ dat, make it harder fo’ Featherston to fight the Yankees.”
“We get hit, make it harder for us to fight anybody,” Pyrrhus said.
“You don’t got the nerve, you kin stay where you’s at,” Gracchus told him.
The older Negro refused to rise to the bait. “Got me plenty o’ nerve, an’ everybody knows it. Got me some sense, too, an’ you sure ain’t showin’ none.”
“Only way we live through this is if the Yankees come,” Cassius said. “Yankees stay away, sooner or later the militia an’ the Mexicans hunt us down an’ kill us. If we can help the USA, we oughta do it.”
“Hear dat?” Gracchus said. “This is one smart nigger. You don’t want to listen to me, listen to him.”
“You reckon he smart on account of he say the same thing you do. That ain’t reason enough,” Pyrrhus answered. “United States’re comin’ whether we do anything or not. You reckon they get down into Georgia on account o’ what niggers done? Wish it was so, but it ain’t likely.”
Gracchus scowled at him. So did Cassius. It wasn’t likely at all. Another Negro said, “Sure enough wouldn’t mind a little rest-up, anyways.”
At that, Gracchus looked almost ready to explode. Cassius caught the guerrilla leader’s eye and shook his head, ever so slightly. If Gracchus blew up now, he could split the band. Where would they come by new recruits to make either half big enough to be dangerous if that happened? Negroes were thin on the ground in rural Georgia these days.
To Cassius’ relief, Gracchus got the message, or enough of it to keep from losing his temper. He went on glowering at the men who’d thwarted him, but at least he had the sense to see he was thwarted for the time being. “We lay up,” he said reluctantly. “We lay up fo’ now, anyways. But if we sees a chance, we takes it.”
“Fair enough,” Pyrrhus said. Some of the other black guerrillas nodded, all seeming relieved the quarrel wouldn’t explode in their faces.
They didn’t live off the fat of the land. The land had little fat to live off. White farmers had armed guards. Some had squads of Mexican soldiers garrisoned on their land. The henhouses and barns might have been bank vaults. Before too long, the guerrillas would have to raid to eat.
Birdlime and nets brought in songbirds. Cassius had never imagined eating robins and doves, but they weren’t bad at all. “My granddaddy, he used to talk about all the passenger pigeons when he was a pickaninny,” Gracchus said. “Way he told it, you could eat them birds fo’ weeks at a time.”
“Where they at now?” Pyrrhus asked. “Sure don’t see ’em around none.”
“Po’ birds got their fuckin’ population reduced,” Gracchus answered. “Might as well be niggers.”
Two nights later, a Negro sneaked out of Madison, Georgia, the town closest to the tumbledown sharecropping village, with word that a truck convoy had stopped there for the night and would go on to the northwest in the morning. “You ain’t goin’ back,” Gracchus said. “You comin’ wid us. You lyin’, you dyin’.”
“Give me a gun. I want a shot at the ofays my ownself,” the Negro replied.
“I gives you a gun,” Gracchus said. “I gives you one after we gits away. You kin shoot the ofays then.”
“You don’t trust me none,” said the town Negro, whose name was Jeroboam.
“Bet your ass I don’t,” Gracchus said. “I don’t know you from a cowflop. Ain’t got no reason to trust you-yet. But you give me one, we git on fine.”
Jeroboam knew the road that led to the front. Like a lot of rural roads, it was badly potholed; money’d gone into guns and barrels and murder camps and main highways, not the roads that meandered between them. One of those potholes let the guerrillas plant explosives without digging under the roadbed from the side, which would have taken longer and been much too conspicuous once done.
Gracchus placed his men in the high grass and bushes to either side of the road southeast of the bomb. The CSA had too much to do to bother clearing weeds, either. With any luck at all, the white Confederates would pay for their neglect.
Jeroboam lay in the bushes only a couple of strides from Gracchus. He was bound and gagged; nothing he did or said would warn the men in the approaching truck convoy-if there was an approaching truck convoy. He hadn’t squawked when Gracchus told him what they were going to do. Cassius hoped that argued he was truthful. If it didn’t, it argued that he was a good actor.
With autumn here, fewer bugs bothered Cassius than would have a few months earlier. He scratched anyway. He knew he was lousy. The only thing he had to kill lice was kerosene, a cure almost worse than the problem. He’d always been clean; his mother was neat, his father downright fastidious. Now they were almost surely dead, and he had nasty little bugs crawling over his scalp.
“Heads up!” somebody called. Cassius flattened himself into the grass. Why did people say that when they meant duck down? He supposed it came from football or some other game.
Then, catching the low rumble of approaching trucks, he stopped worrying about things that didn’t matter. How much protection did they have with them? If four or five armored cars and half-tracks were in the convoy, the plan was to blow up the lead vehicle and then just slip away. Getting into an expensive skirmish was the last thing Gracchus wanted.
Closer…Closer…The machine in front was a truck. It was, in fact, a captured U.S. truck-blockier than C.S. models-with a coat of butternut paint slapped on over the original green-gray.
Gracchus had the plunger whose wires led to the explosives in the roadway. He jerked down on it at just the right moment. The truck went up in a fireball that engulfed the one behind it, which was following too close. The other trucks in the convoy slammed on the brakes. As soon as they did, Cassius and the rest of the black guerrillas started shooting.
He’d never fired a rifle till he joined Gracchus’ band. He sure knew what to do with one now. He fired again and again, working the bolt on the Tredegar and slapping in a fresh clip when the one he was using ran dry. The rifle butt slammed against his shoulder again and again. He’d be sore tomorrow…assuming he was still alive.
The drivers had rifles and submachine guns of their own, and started shooting back. And then Cassius heard an unmistakable machine gun banging away, and ice walked through him. That sure sounded as if it came from a weapon most likely to be mounted on an armored vehicle. He hoped the guerrillas had some Featherston Fizzes, but getting close enough to throw one could prove more dangerous to the man with it than to his intended target.
And then he heard something else: a deep rumble from the northwest, rising swiftly to multiple screams in the air. Yankee fighter-bombers had spotted the convoy with the burning trucks corking its way forward. The airplanes gleefully swooped down for the kill.
Cassius had imagined hell on earth, with the Confederate military playing a star role in the roaster. Now he saw it: truck after truck smashed by bombs or by machine-gun and cannon fire. Gouts of flame erupted from the road. The trucks couldn’t run, couldn’t hide, couldn’t even shoot back. The men inside them died where they sat-or, if they tried to run for cover, the black guerrillas shot them.
Only one thing was wrong with the fire and brimstone visited upon the convoy-some of it slopped over onto Gracchus’ band. Not all the bombs hit right on the road. Neither did all the shells and bullets. Chances were the U.S. pilots didn’t even know the Negroes were there. If they knew, they didn’t give a damn. Their mission was to smash up enemy transport. They did that up brown. Everything else was just a detail.
To them, it was a detail. It was liable to get Cassius killed. He hugged the ground while bullets smashed down much too close and blast tried to pick him up and throw him away. Somebody close by screamed, “No! No! No!” After a little while, he realized he was making those noises.
The U.S. warplanes couldn’t have lingered more than ten minutes. They came, they saw, they destroyed. And the truck convoy was much more thoroughly wrecked than either Gracchus or Jeroboam could have imagined.
“Shitfire!” Gracchus cried in a mix of awe and outrage. “Ain’t even nothin’ left fo’ us to steal!”
“Hell you say,” Pyrrhus answered, and paused to shoot a dazed and bloodied Confederate truck driver who staggered toward him. As the white man fell, the guerrilla went on, “Almost got myself squashed by a big old crate of rations-landed in these bushes here.”
“Well, that’s somethin’.” Gracchus sounded as if he didn’t know how much it was. Cassius didn’t, either. You could eat Confederate rations and you wouldn’t be hungry afterwards. Past that, he had nothing good to say for them. He’d heard even Confederate soldiers traded cigarettes or coffee with the enemy to get food better than their own.
“Mother!” a dreadfully wounded Confederate screamed. “Motherrr!” Cassius drew a bead on him and shot him through the head.
“Why you go an’ do dat?” a Negro asked. “Shoulda let the damn ofay suffer.”
“I’d shoot a dog,” Cassius said.
“Yeah, but a dog, he wouldn’t shoot you,” the other rebel said.
After a moment, Cassius decided he had a point. Instead of admitting it, he changed the subject, calling out to Gracchus, “You gonna let that Jeroboam loose?”
“Reckon I better,” the guerrilla leader said. “He wasn’t lyin’, that’s fo’ damn sure. An’ we ought to write a nice thank-you to them Yankees. They done a lot of work fo’ us.” He laughed. “Reckon they done mo’ work than we coulda did our ownselves.”
He wasn’t wrong. “Wonder how many of us those U.S. pilots hit,” Cassius said, and laughed at himself. He was sure he was the only rebel in the band-maybe in the state-who would have said those pilots. To the other Negroes, it would have been them pilots. Like it or not, Cassius was his father’s son.
The guerrillas had lost one man dead and two more wounded, neither seriously. “Watch what happen to them trucks, an’ do Jesus! I don’t hardly mind gettin’ shot,” one of the injured men said. The dead guerrilla had stopped a 20mm cannon shell with his chest. Chances were he wouldn’t have agreed.
Carrying the rations and other small bits of loot, the black rebels made their getaway. Behind them, the shattered convoy sent up great dark plumes of smoke. Before long, whites would come out from Madison to see what had happened-not that they could be in much doubt-and do what they could for anyone left alive.
Cassius smiled as he trotted away. God hadn’t come down from the heavens to give the guerrillas a hand, but the next best thing had.
Jorge Rodriguez wondered how long he could go on. He wondered how long the Confederate States could go on, too. If the damnyankees kept pounding on them the way they had been, it wouldn’t be much longer. Autumn or no autumn, rain or no rain, the United States were driving on Atlanta, and Jorge didn’t see how the Confederacy could stop them.
He didn’t worry about it all that much, either. He worried about staying alive. With everything the damnyankees were throwing at his regiment, that was plenty all by itself.
Kennesaw Mountain was heavily wooded country. U.S. artillery was firing shells fused for air bursts. If you didn’t have a good foxhole, the fragments knifing down from above would cut you to ribbons. Jorge did. He was proud of the hole, which he’d dug himself. He could fire from it when enemy soldiers drew near. But it also had a small shelter strengthened with boards-what they would have called a bombproof in the Great War-scraped out under the forward lip. When the shelling got bad, he’d duck under there and stay fairly safe.
Right this minute, there was a lull. He could get out of his hole, ease himself behind a tree, smoke a cigarette. He could, yes, as long as he stayed wary as a cat at a coon-hound convention. Things had a way of picking up with no warning. If you didn’t dive back into your hole in a hurry, you’d be a casualty.
“Stay alert, men!” Captain Malcolm Boyd called. “They’re liable to throw paratroops at us like they did in Tennessee.”
If the United States tried an air drop here, they had to be crazy. It looked that way to Jorge, anyhow. Too many paratroops would get stuck in trees and die before they could start fighting.
“We’ve got to hang on to Marietta no matter what, too,” the company commander added. “We don’t hang on to Marietta, how the hell can we hold Atlanta?”
There he made more sense to Jorge. Marietta was the cork in the bottle-probably the last cork in the bottle in front of Atlanta. If it fell, Atlanta almost had to. And if Atlanta fell, the Confederate States were in a hell of a lot of trouble. So everybody said, anyhow. Jorge knew things everybody said weren’t always right, but this one felt too likely to laugh off.
He wished he wouldn’t have heard so many things like, We’ve got to hang on to Chattanooga no matter what. The Confederates couldn’t hang on to Chattanooga. Now they were paying for losing it.
An automatic rifle rattled up ahead. When Jorge first went into the Army, that would have meant the man with the rifle wore butternut. No more, not necessarily. The Yankees had captured a lot of C.S. automatic weapons on their long drive south. They’d captured the ammo the rifles used, too-or maybe they were making their own. Jorge didn’t know about that. He did know he had to wait and hear more before he could be sure who was out there.
Sure as hell, the bangs that followed came from U.S. Springfields. In the CSA, nobody but home guards and Mexican soldiers used bolt-action rifles these days. The damnyankees were still a long step behind when it came to small arms. Some Confederate soldiers wondered what the enemy was doing in Georgia if that was so.
To Jorge, the answer looked clear enough. Yes, Yankee soldiers carried Springfields. But whole great swarms of Yankee soldiers carried them. U.S. artillery matched anything the Confederacy turned out. So did U.S. airplanes, and the United States had more of them than the Confederate States did. As for barrels…Jorge didn’t want to think about barrels. The USA’s new monsters outclassed everything the CSA made.
He peered down the forward slope of Kennesaw Mountain. He couldn’t see the enemy troops, but he had a pretty good idea where the gunfire was coming from. The damnyankees were probing in front of his regiment, trying to find a way through. He could have done without the compliment, if that was what it was.
The automatic rifle chattered again. Right about…there, Jorge judged. If the fellow who carried it kept coming forward, he’d probably show himself somewhere near those two pines.
And, a couple of minutes later, he did-not for very long, but long enough. Jorge fired a short burst from his own automatic rifle. The U.S. soldier threw up his hands and toppled. Jorge didn’t think he’d get up again. He looked around for a new target.
Easier to think of what he’d just done as hitting a target. If he thought of that figure in green-gray as a soldier, as a man, then he had to think about everything shooting his fellow soldier, his fellow man, might mean. But a target was only a target. You could shoot at a target for fun, if you felt like it.
Almost as much to the point, targets didn’t shoot back.
Jorge wondered if another U.S. soldier would try to retrieve the automatic rifle. If a man in green-gray did, it would be his last mistake. But the rifle lay where it fell. The damnyankees seemed confident they could drive the Confederates back and then retrieve it. Jorge had to hope they were wrong.
He waited for the next artillery barrage or armored assault or gas attack or air raid or whatever the enemy had in mind. Instead, a U.S. officer waved a white flag from behind a tree and shouted, “Can I come forward?”
Firing on both sides died away. Sergeant Blackledge shouted back: “Yeah, come ahead. What do you want?”
The Yankee emerged, still holding the flag of truce. As he approached the Confederate lines, he answered, “Want to try to talk you people into surrendering, that’s what. You keep fighting, we’ll squash you flat.”
“Yeah, now tell me another one,” Blackledge jeered. “You want to win one on the cheap, that’s all.”
“Not this time,” said the man in green-gray. “We’ll take some of your guys behind our lines, show you what we’ve got. I don’t believe you can stop us, or even slow us down very much.”
“You’ll do what?” The sergeant sounded as if he couldn’t believe his ears. Jorge didn’t blame him. The damnyankees had never said anything like that, not where he could hear it. He’d never heard of anything like it, either.
Calmly, the U.S. officer repeated himself. He went on, “Will you take me back? This is what they’d call a limited-time offer on the wireless. If you don’t take me up on it pretty damn quick, you’ll find out whether I’m lying or not. Oh, yeah-better believe you will.”
If he was acting, he could go out on the road. The confidence that filled his voice seemed frighteningly convincing. Maybe Sergeant Blackledge thought the same thing, because he said, “Come on up, damn you. I’m gonna put a blindfold on you before you go back of the line, though. You won’t do any spying under flag of truce.”
“Have it your way,” the Yankee said. “Like I told you, you can look at what we’ve got.” He walked forward. The sergeant put a rag over his eyes and led him back toward C.S. officers. Nobody on either side fired. A few U.S. soldiers came out and swapped rations for smokes and coffee. Jorge just sat tight and waited.
After about twenty minutes, the blindfolded U.S. officer returned, three worried-looking Confederates in his wake. He took off the rag and nodded to Sergeant Blackledge. “Cease-fire will last till these gentlemen come back,” he said. “After that, it’s up to them.”
“We won’t open up unless your guys do,” the noncom replied.
Away they went, the one man in green-gray and the three in butternut. Jorge was sure the Confederates would see only what their enemies wanted to show them. That was liable to be plenty. He waited. He smoked. He climbed out of his hole to take a leak. He didn’t want to be a POW; one of his brothers already languished in a camp. He didn’t want to get killed, either.
An hour and a half later, the C.S. officers returned. Their U.S. guide stopped between the lines. “You can still change your minds,” he said. “This is your last chance, but you can. You’ll spare your men a lot of grief.”
“We’re obliged to defend this position, Major,” a Confederate colonel said. “We will do so to the best of our ability.”
“You’ll be sorry,” the Yankee said. “Your men will be sorrier. I can’t answer for what will happen to them when we cut loose.”
“We have to take the chance, sir,” the Confederate replied. “We have our duty, as you have yours. With our country in danger, our personal safety is of small concern.”
“That sounds very pretty. You’ll find out what it means. You’re sure?” The U.S. officer waited. No one said anything more. The major shrugged and returned to his own lines. One of the Confederates used a field telephone to tell their headquarters what they’d done. All three of them stayed on the front line. Jorge admired that. They could have retreated to safety. Instead, they were sticking it out.
Somewhere between five and ten minutes went by. Then the United States opened up with everything they’d shown the Confederate officers and more besides. Jorge didn’t think he’d ever gone through a bombardment like this. Fighter-bombers stooped on the C.S. line and added their weight of hellfire to the mix. He heard shrieks through the thunder of exploding ordnance. Jorge carried a rosary in his pocket, and fingered the beads to thank God and the Virgin that his own shrieks weren’t among them.
Wise in the Yankees’ ways, he popped up from his hole the instant the barrage lifted. Sure as the devil, soldiers in green-gray scrambled forward. He shot one of them. Another alert Confederate nailed a different one. The rest hit the dirt or ducked behind trees. But they weren’t giving up. That would have been too much to ask for. They kept on coming. They just didn’t think it would be a walkover any more.
More shells and some mortar bombs started dropping on the Confederates. Shouts and curses off to the left warned that enemy troops had reached and were probably piercing the line there. A moment later, enfilading fire made the probability a sure thing.
“Back!” Sergeant Blackledge yelled. Jorge might have known nothing the USA fired at the Confederates could hurt him. “They’ll cut us off if we stay!”
“The sergeant’s right!” Captain Boyd added, perhaps relieved Blackledge spoke up before he had to. “We need to save ourselves!”
Jorge didn’t want to get out of his hole, any more than a mouse wanted to come out into the middle of the floor. Bullets and flying fragments did dreadful things to soft, tender flesh. But he’d get captured or killed if he stayed here. Out he came, and ran up the north slope of Kennesaw Mountain toward one of the two crests.
A bullet slammed into a tree trunk just to his left. A big shell burst behind him-at least a six-incher. None of the fragments tore into him, but blast-a St. Bernard puppy the size of a building-picked him up and shook him and dropped him on his face. He scrambled up again, knowing he was lucky to be able to. Blast could kill all by itself. Had that shell come down a little closer…
Best not to think of such things. He ducked behind another tree to see how close the damnyankees were. Two or three were too damn close for comfort. He fired at them. They went down, though he didn’t think he’d hit them. But he would have done the same thing in their boots. Why take chances when you were winning?
“Way to go, Rodriguez,” Sergeant Blackledge said from behind another tree. He seemed to be everywhere at once. “Make ’em earn it, by God. They won’t come on like their pants are on fire now, the bastards.”
“Sure, Sarge.” Jorge hadn’t thought of anything more than saving his own skin. He still wasn’t sure he could do that. The U.S. major hadn’t been kidding. The United States put a rock in their fist before they hit Kennesaw Mountain. More shells came down. He huddled in what wasn’t enough shelter. “?Madre de Dios!” When he got scared into Spanish, things were pretty bad. “What can we do?”
“Try and stay alive.” As usual, Blackledge was relentlessly pragmatic. “Try and find some place where we can make a stand, slow the shitheels down. Try and hit back when they give us the chance. Sooner or later, they will-I hope.” He swore, plainly wishing he hadn’t tacked on the last two words.
“Marietta’s gonna fall, isn’t it?” Jorge asked. The sergeant didn’t answer. For a second, Jorge thought he didn’t hear. Then he realized the noncom didn’t want to say yes. If Marietta fell, Atlanta was in deep trouble. If Atlanta fell, the Confederate States were in deep trouble. And Marietta would fall, which meant…
Purple martins perched in the shattered trees in the park square at the center of Marietta. The birds were flying south for the winter; they didn’t care that the trees had taken a beating. There were still plenty of bugs in the air. All the artillery in the world couldn’t kill bugs.
Chester Martin, in green-gray, didn’t care that the trees were burned and scarred, either. As far as he was concerned, the Confederate States were getting what was coming to them. And he hoped he was going south for the winter. Atlanta wasn’t that far away. How much did the enemy have between here and there? Enough? He didn’t think so.
A man with a white mustache hung from a lamppost. A sign around his neck said, I SHOT AT U.S. SOLDIERS. He’d been there a couple of days, and was starting to swell and stink. Chester hardly looked at him. Maybe he’d do a little good; maybe he wouldn’t. Confederate bushwhackers and diehards and holdouts and red-ass civilians kept on harrying the occupiers all the way back to the Ohio River. Hostages kept dying because of it. Which side would run out of will first remained unclear.
The trees in the park weren’t all that had been shattered in Marietta. The Confederates fought hard to hold it. Not many houses were whole. Glassless windows might have been the eye sockets of skulls. Scorch marks scored clapboard. Chunks of walls and chunks of roofs bitten by shellfire gave the skyline jagged edges.
And Marietta’s people seemed as ravaged as the town. They were skinny and dirty, many of them with bandages or simply rags wrapped around wounds. They stared at the U.S. troops trudging south through their rubble-strewn streets with eyes that smoldered. Nobody said anything much, though. As Chester had seen in other Confederate towns, his buddies were quick to resent insults. A man with a rifle in enemy country could make his resentment felt.
A scrawny woman whose hair flew every which way cocked a hip in a pose meant to be alluring. “Sleep with me?” she called.
“Jesus!” said one of the soldiers in Chester’s squad. “I’ve been hard up before, but not that hard up.”
“Yeah.” Chester nodded. “I think she’s a little bit cracked. Maybe more than a little bit.”
An old man whose left sleeve hung empty scowled at him. Chester nodded back, more politely than not. He understood honest hate, and could respect it. He wondered if the respect he showed might change the Confederate’s mind. It didn’t, not by the look on the man’s face. Chester didn’t suppose he should have been surprised.
A burnt-out C.S. barrel sat inside the ruins of a brick house. The last few feet of the barrel’s gun poked out through a window. The gun tube sagged visibly. Eyeing it, Chester said, “Must’ve been a hell of a fire.”
“Yeah, well, it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys,” said the soldier who didn’t want the scrawny woman.
Chester grunted. He didn’t love Confederate barrelmen. What U.S. soldier did? Those enemies were too good at killing his pals. But he didn’t like to think of them cooking like beef roasts in a fire so hot it warped solid steel. That was a bad way to go, for anybody on either side. He wanted the enemy barrel crew dead, sure. Charred to black hideousness? Maybe not.
“Come on, step it up!” Lieutenant Lavochkin yelled. “We aren’t camping here. We’re just passing through, heading for Atlanta.”
Chester looked forward to fighting for Atlanta the way he looked forward to a filling without novocaine. Atlanta was a big city, bigger than Chattanooga. The United States couldn’t take it by surprise, the way they had with the Tennessee town. If U.S. forces tried smashing straight into it, wouldn’t the Confederates do unto them as the USA had done to the Confederacy in Pittsburgh? Fighting one house at a time was the easiest way Chester knew to become a casualty.
Maybe the brass had a better plan. He hoped like hell they did. But if so, nobody’d bothered passing the word down to an overage retread first sergeant.
A kid wearing what looked like his big brother’s dungarees said, “Get out of my country, you damnyankee.”
“Shut up, you lousy brat, or I’ll paddle your ass.” Chester gestured with his rifle. “Scram. First, last, and only warning.”
To his relief, the kid beat it. You didn’t want to think a nine-year-old could be a people bomb, but he’d heard some ugly stories. Boys and girls didn’t fully understand what flicking that switch meant, which made them more likely to do it. And soldiers sometimes didn’t suspect children till too late.
“Hell of a war,” Chester muttered.
Some of his men liberated three chickens to go with their rations. They didn’t have time to do anything but roast poorly plucked chicken pieces over a fire. The smell of singeing feathers took Chester back half a lifetime. He’d done the same thing in the Great War. Then as now, a drumstick went a long way toward making your belly stop growling.
He was smoking a cigarette afterwards when a grenade burst not far away. Somebody screamed. A burst of fire from a submachine gun was followed by another shriek.
“Fuck,” said a soldier named Leroy, who was more often called the Duke.
“Never a dull moment,” Chester agreed. “We’re licking these bastards, but they sure haven’t quit.”
As if to prove it, the Confederates threw in a counterattack the next day. Armor spearheaded it: not barrels, but what seemed more like self-propelled guns on tracked chassis. They weren’t mounted in turrets, but pointed straight ahead. That meant the enemy driver had to line up his machine on a target instead of just traversing the turret. The attack bogged down south of Marietta. A regiment of U.S. barrels made the C.S. barrelbusters say uncle.
Chester examined a wrecked machine with a professional’s curiosity. “What’s the point of these, sir?” he asked Captain Rhodes. A U.S. antibarrel round had smashed through the side armor. He didn’t want to think about what the crew looked like. You could probably bury them in a jam tin.
“These things have to be cheaper to build than barrels, and quicker to build, too,” the company commander answered. “If you’ve got to have as much firepower as you can get, and if you need it yesterday, they’re a lot better than nothing.”
“I guess,” Chester said. “Ugly damn thing, isn’t it?”
“Now that you mention it, yes-especially if you’re on the wrong end of it,” Rhodes said. “Get used to it, Sergeant. You can bet your ass you’ll see more of them.”
He was bound to be right. And if they were cheap and easy to make…“What do you want to bet we start cranking ’em out, too?”
Captain Rhodes looked startled, but then he nodded. “Wouldn’t be surprised. Anything they can do, we can do, too. We’re lucky we’ve kept our lead in barrels as long as we have. Maybe the Confederates were too busy with these things to pay as much attention to those as they should have.”
“Breaks my heart,” Martin said dryly.
The company commander laughed-but not for long. “Be ready for a push of our own, soon as we can move more shit forward. When the Confederates hit us, they use stuff up faster than they can resupply. Might as well kick ’em while they’re down.”
“Mm?” Chester weighed that, then nodded. “Yeah, I bet you’re right, sir. I’ll get the men ready. You think we’re going into Atlanta?”
“Christ, I hope not!” Rhodes blurted, which was about what Chester was thinking himself. Rhodes went on, “We do try to go straight in there, a lot of us’ll come out in a box.”
“Looks like that to me, too. So what do we do instead?” Chester asked. “Just bomb it flat? Or maybe try and flank ’em out?”
“My guess is, we go that way.” Captain Rhodes pointed east. “We do that, we cut the direct train and truck routes between Richmond and Atlanta. Yeah, the Confederates can get around it, but we put ourselves in a good position for hitting the lines and the roads coming up from the south. I’d sure rather do that than charge in with my head down.”
“Me, too,” Chester said fervently. “Amen, in fact. You think the brass has the smarts to see it like you do?”
“Well, we’ll find out,” Rhodes replied with a dry chuckle. But he didn’t seem too downcast. “Start of this campaigning season, we were chucking the Confederates out of Ohio. Now they’re trying to get us out of Georgia. I think maybe General Morrell knows what he’s doing.”
“Here’s hoping,” Chester said, which made the company commander laugh out loud.
The U.S. push went in three days later. The Confederates had done what they could to build a line south of Marietta, and it held for most of a day, but once U.S. armor cracked it the enemy didn’t have much behind it. Then Confederates fired what had to be half the rockets in the world at the advancing men in green-gray. They were scary-hell, they were terrifying. They caused casualties, not a few of them. But, without enough men in butternut on the ground to hold it, the rockets couldn’t stop the U.S. forces.
And the main axis of the U.S. attack aimed not at Atlanta but at Lawrenceville, almost due east of Marietta. Captain Rhodes looked uncommonly smug. Chester Martin didn’t say boo. How could he? The captain had earned the right.
Heavy bombers and fighter-bombers stayed overhead all the time, tearing up the countryside south of the U.S. advance and keeping the Confederates in and around Atlanta from striking at the U.S. flank. Lots and lots of artillery fire came down on the enemy, too. Chester approved of every single shell and wished there were more.
Every time U.S. forces crossed a railroad line, demolition teams tore hell out of it. Every time U.S. forces crossed a paved road that ran north and south, engineers dynamited bridges and blew craters in the roadway. Even if the Confederates rallied and drove back the men in green-gray, they wouldn’t move much into or out of Atlanta any time soon.
For the first time, Confederate prisoners seemed to lose heart. “Thanks for not shootin’ me,” one of them said as he went to the rear with his hands high. “Reckon we’re whipped any which way.”
“See what Featherston’s freedom got you?” Chester said.
“Well, we’re rid of most of our niggers, anyways, so that’s good,” the POW said. “But hell, Yank, you’re right-we coulda done that without gettin’ in another war with y’all.”
“You started it,” Chester said. “We’ll finish it.”
Freedom Party Guards, by contrast, still believed they’d win. “Wait till the secret weapons get you,” said a man in camouflage overalls. “You’ll be sorry then.”
“Yeah, the bogeyman’ll get you if you don’t watch out,” Chester jeered. The captured Confederate glared at him. Under the guns of half a dozen soldiers in green-gray, he couldn’t do more, not if he wanted to keep breathing. “Take him away,” Chester said. “Let him try his line of bullshit on the Intelligence boys.”
“It ain’t bullshit!” the Freedom Party Guardsman said. “You’ll find out! And you’ll be sorry when you do, too.”
“Yeah, sure, buddy,” Chester said. Two men took the POW off to the rear.
“The crap they come up with,” another U.S. soldier said, lighting up a Habana he’d taken from a prisoner. “He sounded like he believed it, too.”
“People used to believe the world was flat,” Chester said. The soldier laughed and nodded. But the Guardsman had sounded mighty sure of himself. And Chester remembered all the rockets the Confederates seemed to have pulled from nowhere. He was a little more worried than he let on-not a lot, but a little.
Flora Blackford hurried into the House chamber. She’d got the summons to the joint session of Congress only a little while before. Other Representatives and Senators were grumbling at having to change plans to get here on time. She understood why. The President wouldn’t ask for a joint session much in advance. That would give the Confederates-and maybe other enemies-more time to come up with something unpleasant.
The Speaker of the House rapped loudly for order. When he got something close to quiet, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I have the distinct honor and high privilege of introducing the President of the United States, Charles W. La Follette!”
Applause rang through the hall. Charlie La Follette took his place behind the lectern. He was tall and ruddy and handsome, with a splendid shock of white hair the cartoonists loved. He’d been President for almost a year and a half now, but still didn’t seem to have stepped out from under Al Smith’s shadow. Maybe today was the day.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the Congress, my fellow Americans, 1943 has blessed our arms with victory,” he said. “When the year began, we were driving invaders from western Pennsylvania. Now Pennsylvania and Ohio have been liberated, and our armies stand not far from Atlanta, the hub of the Confederate States of America.”
More applause washed over him, loud and fierce. He grinned and held up a hand. “We have also driven deep into Texas, and seen with our own eyes the horror the Confederates have visited on their Negro population. The murder factory called Camp Determination, at least, will perpetrate those horrors no more.”
This time, the applause was more tentative, though Flora clapped till her palms hurt. Pictures of those enormous mass graves-the words hardly did them justice-had been in all the weeklies for a while. Even so, the furor was less than she’d hoped for. People either didn’t care or didn’t want to believe what they were seeing was true.
“Everywhere, Confederate forces are in retreat,” the President said. “Even Jake Featherston must see that he cannot hope to win the war he started two and a half years ago. This being so, I call on him to surrender unconditionally and spare his country the bloodshed further resistance would cause.
“Though they do not deserve them, I promise him and his leading henchmen their lives. We will take them into exile on a small island, and will guard them there so they can no longer trouble North America and blight its hopes. Confederate soldiers will be disarmed and sent home. All Confederates, white and colored, will be guaranteed life, liberty, and property.
“Think well, President Featherston. If you reject this call, both you and your country will regret it. We will leave wireless frequency 640 kilocycles unjammed for your reply for the next forty-eight hours. You will be sorry if you say no.” He stepped away from the microphones on the lectern, putting notes back into an inside pocket of his jacket as he did.
Flora applauded again. So did most of the other members of Congress. If the war ended now…If it ends now, Joshua won’t get hurt, she thought. That alone gave her plenty of reason to hope. Hope or not, though, she feared Featherston would ignore the call.
The hall emptied as fast as it had filled. Now no one had a great big target to aim at. Flora hurried to her office. She tuned the wireless set there to 640. She didn’t know how long the President of the CSA would take to answer, but she wanted to hear him when he did.
He needed less than two hours. “Here is a statement by President Featherston of the Confederate States of America,” an announcer said.
“I’m Jake Featherston, and I’m here to tell you the truth.” That familiar, rasping, hate-filled voice snarled out of the wireless set. “And the truth is, people of the USA and President La Follette, we aren’t about to surrender. We’ve got no reason to. We’re going to win this war, and you’ll be laughing out of the other side of your mouth pretty damn quick.
“Philadelphia will get the message in just a few minutes. Philadelphia will get it twice, matter of fact. You wait, you watch, and you listen. Then you figure out who ought to be doing the surrendering. So long for now. You’ll hear more from me soon.”
Flora said something that would have shocked her secretary. It amounted to, The nerve of the man! He couldn’t have bombers that close to Philadelphia. U.S. Y-ranging gear would have picked them up. And there was bound to be a heavy combat air patrol above the de facto capital of the USA. Bombers-even captured U.S. bombers or C.S. warplanes painted in U.S. colors-might not get through. But Jake Featherston had sounded devilishly sure of himself.
Terrorists inside the city? People bombers waiting to press their buttons? Flora’s mouth tightened. She knew those were both possibilities. Could Featherston be so sure they’d do their job on short notice? Maybe that was why he hadn’t answered right after President La Follette’s speech. Or…
A loud explosion rattled Flora’s teeth and put ripples in the coffee in her half-full cup. Long experience told her that was a one-ton bomb going off not nearly far enough away. No air-raid sirens howled. It hadn’t fallen from an enemy bomber. Flora was sure of that.
Maybe three minutes later, another blast echoed through Philadelphia, this one a little farther from her office. “Vey iz mir!” she exclaimed. She didn’t know what Featherston and his minions had done, but no denying he’d kept his promise.
After about a quarter of an hour, he came back on the wireless. “I’m Jake Featherston, and I’m here to say I told you the truth,” he crowed. He must have waited till he got word his plan, whatever it was, had worked. “See how you like it, Philadelphia. Plenty more where those came from, and we’ll spread ’em around, too. Surrender? Nuts! We just started fighting.”
If anyone in Philadelphia knew what the Confederates had done, Franklin Roosevelt was likely to be the man. What point to having connections if you didn’t use them? Flora dialed his number, hoping she’d get through.
She did. “Hello, Flora!” Roosevelt still sounded chipper. As far as she could tell, he always did. But he went on, “Can’t talk long. Busy as the Devil after a fire at an atheists’ convention right now.”
“Heh,” Flora said uneasily. “You must know why I’m calling, though. What did the Confederates just do to us?”
“Well, it looks like a rocket,” the Assistant Secretary of War answered. “Two rockets, I should say.”
“Rockets? You mean they had them set up somewhere outside of town and fired them off when Featherston told them to?”
“No, I don’t think that’s what happened, not from the first look we’ve had at what’s left of them.” Franklin Roosevelt kept that jaunty air, but he sounded serious, too. And he wasted no time explaining why: “Our best guess is, they shot them up here from Virginia.”
“From Virginia? Gevalt!” Flora said. “That’s got to be-what? A couple of hundred miles? I didn’t know you could make rockets fly that far.”
“Unfortunately, I can’t. But Jake Featherston can, damn his black heart,” Roosevelt said.
“What can we do to stop them?” Flora asked.
“At this end, nothing. They get here too fast,” he said. “If they’ve got bases or launchers or whatever you call them, maybe we can bomb those. I hope so, anyway. But I don’t know that for a fact, you understand.”
“How much damage did they do?” Flora found one bad question after another.
“One blew a big hole in a vacant lot. The other one hit in front of an apartment building.” Now Roosevelt was thoroughly grim. “Quite a few casualties. But it would have been worse at night, with more people at home and fewer out working.”
“Do they aim them at Philadelphia? Or do they aim them, say, at the corner of Chestnut and Broad?” Yes, all kinds of nasty questions to ask.
“Right now, your guess is as good as mine. If I had to bet, I’d say they just aim them at Philadelphia. A rocket can’t be that accurate…can it? But that’s only a wild-ass guess-excuse the technical term.”
In spite of everything, Flora smiled. “Thanks, Franklin. I needed that. What are we going to do? If we can’t stop these rockets and we can’t even warn against them, how do we go on?”
“As best we can,” Roosevelt answered. “Stick a rabbit’s foot in your purse if you don’t already have one. Remember that every time the Confederates build one of these, they don’t build something else. And some will be duds, and some will go boom without doing much damage. As much as anything else, they’re trying to scare us.”
“They’re pretty good at it, aren’t they?” Flora said. Roosevelt laughed merrily, as if she were joking. What he hadn’t said was that some of the rockets would blow houses and apartments and factories to kingdom come. Then something even worse than that occurred to her. “Can they load anything besides ordinary explosives onto these…things?”
“You mean like gas? I think explosives would hurt us more,” Roosevelt said.
Flora had no doubt he was being dense on purpose. “Gas, maybe,” she said. “Or other things.” She didn’t want to say too much on the telephone.
Obviously, neither did he. “Not right away,” he answered. “I’ve already talked with some people. They need a bigger rocket or a smaller thing. So that’s all right for a while, anyhow.”
“For a while. How long is a while?”
“I have no idea. If it’s not till we finish licking them, it doesn’t matter. And now I’ve got to go. Other people to talk to. Stay safe.”
“How?” Flora asked, but she was talking to a dead line. Sighing, she hung up, too. She heard no more bangs out of the blue. That was something. Maybe Featherston had only two ready, and more would have to wait a while. Again, though, how long was a while? Not nearly so long as the Confederates would need to load a uranium bomb on a rocket-Flora was all too sure of that.
Her secretary looked into the inner office. “Were those booms the Confederates or the Mormons, Congresswoman?”
“Mr. Roosevelt says they were the Confederates, Bertha,” Flora answered.
Bertha nodded. “Figured you’d be talking to him. How did they sneak the bombs in? Can’t we stop stuff like that?”
Were the rockets secret? The War Department would probably like to keep them that way, but it would be like trying to classify the sunrise. Like it or not, everybody would know about them before long. Flora told Bertha what she’d heard.
“All the way up from Virginia? How do they do that?” Bertha said.
“If we knew, we’d do it, too,” Flora said dryly. “I bet like anything we’re trying to figure it out, though.”
“Oh, boy.” Bertha didn’t sound impressed, for which Flora could hardly blame her. “What’s to keep us all from getting murdered in our beds without even any warning?”
Nothing, Flora thought. “We’re going to take Atlanta pretty soon. If we smash the Confederate States to pieces, they won’t be able to go on with the war.”
“Oh, boy,” her secretary repeated. “How long will that take?”
“I don’t know. Not too long, I hope.” Please, God, let it be before they send Joshua into action. I haven’t asked You for much, but give me that.
“They’ll be shooting off these skyrocket things all the time till then?” Bertha asked.
“Not if we can bomb the places where they shoot them from,” Flora said.
“Hmp.” Bertha made a noise redolent of skepticism. “Did anybody know what a nasty war this would be before they went and started it?”
“Does anybody ever?”
“What are we going to do?” Bertha asked.
“What can we do? We’re stuck in it. We’ve got to win,” Flora said. Bertha didn’t say no, but she didn’t say yes, either.