Jefferson Pinkard watched Confederate soldiers set up antiaircraft guns around Camp Determination. He went over to the major in charge of the job, an officer named Webb Wyatt. “How much good d’you reckon this’ll do?” he asked.
Wyatt shifted a chaw from one cheek to the other and spat a stream of tobacco juice much too close to Pinkard’s highly polished boots. “Well, I’ll tell you,” he drawled. “It’s a hell of a lot better’n not doing anything.”
“Than not doing anything, sir,” Pinkard snapped.
The major in butternut looked him up and down. He was suddenly and painfully conscious that he wore Freedom Party gray himself. “Well, I’ll tell you,” Wyatt said again. “I say sir to people who I reckon deserve it. What did you ever do to make me reckon that?”
Rage ripped through Jeff. It thickened his voice as he ground out, “I’ll tell you what I did, you little chickenshit asshole. I fought in the trenches when you were still in short pants. I joined the Party before you had hair on your nuts. I’ve been runnin’ camps since Jake Featherston got to be President of the CSA. My rank’s the same as major general. You want me to call up Ferd Koenig and ask him if he reckons you ought to call me sir? You cocksucking whistleass, how soon you reckon you’ll see the inside of one of these here camps for your very own self? Well, motherfucker? Answer me, God damn you!”
Major Wyatt went very red. Then, as he realized how much more than he could chew he’d bitten off, he went white instead. Pinkard knew damn well he could send Wyatt to a camp. And he knew damn well he would, too, and enjoy every minute of it. Seeing that anticipation of pleasure yet to come helped break the Army officer.
“Please excuse me, sir,” Wyatt mumbled, and saluted as if on the drill grounds at VMI. “I beg your humble pardon, sir.”
“You fuckin’ well better beg,” Jeff said. “Who ever told you you could talk to a superior officer that way?”
Wyatt bit his lip and stood mute. Pinkard knew what he wasn’t saying: that he didn’t think a camp guard really was his superior, regardless of what rank badges might show. Too bad for him. He’d picked the wrong man to rile.
“Let’s try it again,” Pinkard told him. “How much will these guns help?”
“Sir, if the damnyankees send a whole big swarm of bombers over, you’re screwed.” Did Wyatt sound as if he hoped the USA did just that? If he did, he wasn’t blatant enough to let Jeff call him on it. He went on, “For small raids, or for driving off reconnaissance airplanes, they’ll do a lot.”
“There. You see? You really can answer when you set your mind to it,” Jeff said. “Now-how come we don’t have more fighters to drive off those Yankee fuckers before they get here?”
“On account of all that stuff is back East, sir,” Major Wyatt answered. “Far as Richmond is concerned, west Texas is strictly nowhere. Only good thing about that is, it’s strictly nowhere for the damnyankees, too.”
He had a point, but less of one than he thought. Snyder, Texas, and even Lubbock, Texas, were indeed strictly nowhere to both CSA and USA. But Camp Determination damn well wasn’t. It was the biggest of the camps the Freedom Party was using to solve the Confederacy’s Negro problem. That made it vital to the country and the Party. And the Yankees used it for propaganda against the CSA.
“Can you use those guns against ground targets, too?” Jeff asked.
“Reckon we can if we have to, sir,” Major Wyatt said. “Antiaircraft guns make pretty fair antibarrel guns, no doubt about it. But I think you’re flabbling over nothing if you figure we’ll need to. USA won’t get this far.”
“Well, if the damnyankees don’t get this far, you know how come that’ll be?” Pinkard demanded, his temper rising again. “On account of Freedom Party Guards stopped ’em-more than the Army could do by its lonesome. And you know who asked ’em to send in the guards? Me, that’s who.” He jabbed a thumb at his own chest.
“Uh, yes, sir.” Wyatt was wising up.
He wasn’t wising up fast enough to suit Jeff. “You think maybe people in uniforms that aren’t the same as yours deserve a salute every now and then, Major? How about that, huh? What do you think?”
“Yes, sir, I think they do. I was wrong before.” As if to prove the point, Major Wyatt saluted.
Pinkard returned the salute. He wasn’t about to let the Army man accuse him of not following etiquette. But as far as he was concerned, Wyatt didn’t prove a damn thing except that he had maybe enough sense to try to save his own neck.
With a small sigh, Jeff decided that would have to do. He couldn’t make the man in the butternut uniform love him. All he could do was make Wyatt treat him with military courtesy. I damn well did that, he thought.
“Anything else, Major?” Pinkard asked.
“No, sir.” Wyatt saluted again. Jeff returned it again. The major said, “Permission to leave, sir?” He wasn’t taking any chances now.
“Granted,” Jeff said, and Wyatt got out of there as if the seat of his pants were on fire. He probably thought his drawers were smoking.
Watching the Army man’s ignominious retreat, Jeff smiled a slow, sated smile: almost the smile he might wear after going to bed with Edith. This was a different kind of satisfaction, but no less real. He was somebody, by God. He could throw his weight around. One hand rested on his belly. He had plenty of weight to throw, too. Not bad for somebody who’d figured on spending the rest of his life making steel at the Sloss Works in Birmingham. No, not bad at all.
Another sign he’d arrived was the driver who took him back into Snyder when his shift at Camp Determination was up. Some evenings he spent on a cot in the administrative compound. Not tonight, though. He smiled again as the camp receded behind him. Thinking about the kind of smile he’d have after going to bed with Edith made him want to put on that kind of smile.
Back in the days before the war, he might have had a colored chauffeur. He didn’t suppose anybody had a colored chauffeur any more. Times were changing in the CSA. An ordinary camp guard had to do. That was all right. The guard was the Party equivalent of a private, and privates got stuck with nigger work. That was true in King David’s day, and Julius Caesar’s, and William the Conqueror’s, and it was still true now.
The brakes squeaked when the driver parked the Birmingham in front of Jeff’s house in Snyder. Got to get that seen to, Jeff thought. The driver jumped out and opened the door for him. “Here you are, sir.”
“Thanks, Cletus.” Jeff made a point of learning the men’s names. It didn’t cost him anything, and it made them feel good. “See you in the morning-or sooner if anything goes wrong.” He never stopped worrying. That was probably why things went wrong so seldom.
“Yes, sir.” Cletus had no trouble remembering that he needed to salute. He jumped back into the auto and drove away.
When Pinkard walked into the house, his two stepsons were playing a game on the floor of the front room. It seemed to involve wringing each other’s necks. They broke off as soon as he came in. “Papa Jeff!” they both squealed in the shrill small-boy register just below what only dogs can hear. “Hi, Papa Jeff!” They tried to tackle him. They weren’t big enough, even together. But they were a lot bigger than when he married their mother the year before. One of these days…
He didn’t want to think about that. And he didn’t have to, not when Edith came out of the kitchen and gave him a kiss. “Hello, Jeff,” she said. “Wasn’t sure if you’d be back tonight.”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” he said, and gave her an extra squeeze to show what he had in mind. “What smells good?” he added; an alluring odor followed her.
“I’ve got a nice beef tongue cooking-with cloves and everything, the way you like it.” She paused to eye her sons. “Why don’t you boys go out and play? I’ve got something to tell Papa Jeff.”
“Why can’t we hear?” asked Frank, the older.
“Because I want to tell Papa Jeff, not you-that’s why,” his mother answered. “Now beat it, before I send you to your room instead.” He disappeared even faster than Major Wyatt had. So did his brother Willie.
“What’s up?” Pinkard asked.
“I’m going to have a baby.”
Jeff had gone so long without getting a woman pregnant, he wondered if he was shooting blanks. “Well, I’ll be,” he said. Then he realized Edith had to be looking for something better than that. “Wonderful!” He hugged her and kissed her and, with the boys out of the house, set a possessive hand on her backside.
She smiled. “That’s how this started.”
“I didn’t reckon it was any other way,” Jeff answered. “Jesus, yeah. Not us.”
“Don’t you start.” Edith was a churchgoing woman. She took her faith much more seriously than Jeff took his. He believed in Jake Featherston the way she believed in Jesus. From everything he could see, Jesus didn’t deliver.
Lately, though, Jake Featherston wasn’t delivering, either. The Confederate States were gone from just about all the U.S. territory they took when the war was new. Not even the professional optimists on the wireless were predicting when the CSA would reinvade the USA. All the talk these days was of defense and of outlasting the enemy.
The Freedom Party Guards Ferdinand Koenig threw into the fight had stopped the damnyankees not far beyond Lubbock. They couldn’t retake the town, though, and they couldn’t push U.S. forces back very far. A good-sized chunk of west Texas remained under the Yankee boot heel.
“All right,” Jeff said to Edith, and then, in what had to seem like a change of subject to her but didn’t to him, “I hear the United States are going to start up that, uh, darn state of Houston again-give the collaborators something to do.”
“That’s dreadful!” she exclaimed. “They’re so wicked. They’ve got no business doing anything like that.” She paused, then asked, “How are things at the camp?”
“Going well enough.” He rarely gave her a detailed answer when she asked something like that. She wasn’t really looking for one, either. She both knew and didn’t know what went on inside the barbed wire. She didn’t like to think about it. For that matter, neither did Pinkard. He said, “What shall we name the baby?”
“If it’s a girl, I’d like to call her Lucy, after my mother,” Edith said.
Jeff nodded. “All right. It’s a good name. And if it’s a boy?”
“What do you think of Raymond?” she asked.
He hesitated. Her first husband was called Chick. What the devil was his real name? Jeff didn’t want his son named after the camp guard who’d killed himself. Chick Blades’ real name was…Leroy. Jeff almost snapped his fingers, he was so glad to remember. “Raymond’ll do fine,” he said. That was easy.
He ate more than his share at supper. So did his stepsons-they liked tongue. He smiled to see them stuff themselves. Maybe it would make them sleepy sooner than usual. And it did. He smiled again. Things were going his way.
Edith even let him leave the light on. She usually liked darkness better. “You’re beautiful,” he said. While he stroked her and kissed her, while she touched him, he believed it. And he made her believe he believed it, too.
“Oh, Jeff,” she said, and then, a little later, “Oh, Jeff.” Her nails dug into his back. He spent himself at the same time as she quivered beneath him. The damnyankees, even the camp, seemed a million miles away. They wouldn’t in the morning, though, and that was a crying shame.
“Boston,” Lieutenant Sam Carsten said as a pilot guided the Josephus Daniels through the minefields that kept submersibles and surface raiders away from the harbor. “Boston’s a good town.”
“Oh, yes, sir,” Pat Cooley agreed. The exec went on, “Good restaurants, theaters, all kinds of things you can do here.”
“Yeah.” Sam’s voice was dry. When he was a rating, his liberties here revolved around saloons and whorehouses. Restaurants? Theaters? Those were for other people, people with time on their hands and without money burning a hole in their pocket.
The pilot swung the helm a little to port. “How did you know to do that then?” Cooley asked.
“Simple, sir. Last time I didn’t, I blew up,” the man answered, deadpan.
“That’ll teach you, Pat,” Carsten said.
“Teach me what?” Cooley said in tones more plaintive than they had to be. The pilot chuckled and turned the ship again when he thought he needed to. The Josephus Daniels didn’t explode. Sam was in favor of not exploding.
An hour later, the destroyer escort was tied up at a pier in the U.S. Navy Yard, across the river from Boston proper-and Boston improper-in Charlestown. The first liberty party went off to roister, just as Sam would have without gold stripes on his cuffs.
Since he had them, he went through the Navy Yard to report to his superiors. He gave a lot of salutes and returned just about as many. To his own amusement, he caused a lot of confusion. Here he was, a middle-aged man with several rows of fruit salad on his chest. Young lieutenant commanders and commanders-the up-and-comers in the Navy-would assume he had to be at least a captain, if not of flag rank. Their right arms would start to go up. Then they would see he was only a lieutenant and stop in the middle of their salute till Sam bailed them out with one of his own.
Sometimes they wouldn’t notice they outranked him. When that happened, he gravely returned a salute with one of his own. He left a trail of bemused officers in his wake. He messed up their mental Y-ranging gear.
The men to whom he reported had no doubt about his grade. They were his age, and had the rank he could have aspired to if he weren’t a mustang. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said to the four-striper who headed things. He saluted first.
Returning the courtesy, Captain William McClintock said, “Take a seat, Carsten.”
“Thank you, sir,” Sam said, though he wasn’t sure he was grateful. He’d got used to being skipper of the Josephus Daniels, a potentate who gave orders and had to worry about receiving them only from a distance. Now, under the eyes of five senior officers, he felt more like a bug on a plate than a potentate.
“You’ve had a busy time in the North Atlantic,” McClintock observed. His craggy features and sun-baked skin said he’d spent a lot of time at sea.
“Yes, sir,” Sam answered. What McClintock said was true-and any which way, it was hard to go wrong saying Yes, sir to your superiors.
One of the other captains across the table looked down at some papers through bifocals, tilting his head back to read. Sam wore reading glasses, but still saw well enough at a distance. “You’ve done pretty well for yourself, seems like,” said the captain-his name was Schuyler Moultrie.
“Thank you, sir,” Sam said-one more phrase where it was hard to go wrong.
“Have you had any…special disciplinary problems aboard the Josephus Daniels, Carsten?” Captain McClintock asked.
Sam knew what that meant. Any mustang would have. “No, sir,” he answered. “I try to keep a tight rein on my CPOs-not tight enough to choke ’em, you understand, because they have to do their jobs, but tight enough so they can’t get away with murder.”
McClintock’s mouth twitched in what looked like a swallowed smile. Sam knew what that meant, too-he’d said the right thing. A mustang who still behaved like a CPO himself was liable to let his chiefs run wild, and that wasn’t good for the ship. One of the best pieces of advice he got after his promotion was to remember he was an officer. He always did his best to follow it.
“How badly are you hurting the British?” Captain Moultrie asked.
“Sir, you would know better than I do,” Sam said. Moultrie raised an eyebrow and waited. Sam went on, “I know what we stop. I’ve got an idea of what the other ships in the squadron stop. But I don’t think any of us knows how much gets through in spite of us.”
“Good answer,” said Ken Davenport, the captain at Sam’s far left.
“Seems to be worthwhile, what we’re doing,” McClintock said. He eyed Carsten from across the table. “Anything special you’d like to tell us, Lieutenant? Anything you’ve found out that other skippers ought to know?”
“Not to trust the limeys as far as you can throw them,” Sam said at once. “That freighter with the big guns, the catapult-launched fighter…They’re sneaky bastards.”
McClintock’s grin startled Sam. He hadn’t thought the rugged badlands of that face could rearrange themselves so. “Then what does that make you?” the senior officer asked. “Whatever they threw at you, you beat.”
“I don’t know that for a fact, sir,” Carsten answered. “I wish I did, but I don’t. If they were sneaky enough, they slid on by me, and I never knew the difference.”
“Not too likely, not with Y-ranging gear,” Captain Davenport said, which only proved he didn’t know much about the North Atlantic in dirty weather. By the way Captain McClintock stirred, he was thinking the same thing. Before he could say anything, Davenport went on, “I will say that recognizing the possibility does you credit.”
“Well, that’s true enough,” McClintock said. “We’ve got ourselves a raft of officers who think they’re smarter than they really are. Finding one who thinks he’s dumber than he really is makes for a refreshing change.” He eyed Sam. “Well, Lieutenant, do you want to go back on patrol when your refit’s finished?”
“Sir, I’ll go wherever you send me,” Sam said. “Real destroyers are probably better suited to that job than escorts like my ship, though. They’ve got more legs, so they can cover more ocean. Fewer things are likely to get past them.”
“He is a smart one,” Captain Moultrie remarked.
“So he is. Good for him,” McClintock said placidly. He turned back to Sam. “You aren’t wrong. The only trouble is, we haven’t got enough real destroyers to go around. We’re gaining on it, but we aren’t there yet. And the ones we do have in the North Atlantic, we need farther east. Speed counts for even more there than it does on patrol duty.”
“All right, sir.” Where to send ships wasn’t Sam’s decision. “If you want the Josephus Daniels back out there, that’s where she’ll go.”
“You’re the fellow who landed those Marines on that Confederate coastal island, aren’t you?” Moultrie asked.
“Yes, sir, I did that.” Sam wondered if he should have said he was panting to go back out on patrol. Coastal raiding made for exciting films, but if you were doing it for real you kept all your sphincters puckered tight till you got out of range of Confederate land-based air.
“We have anything like that in the hopper?” Davenport asked.
“Well, we could, if we had an experienced skipper to handle it,” Moultrie answered. They talked as if Sam weren’t there. He wished he weren’t. He wasn’t eager to volunteer for a dangerous mission, but he knew he wouldn’t turn it down if they gave it to him. You didn’t do that, not if you were an officer. You didn’t if you were a rating, either.
“Gives us something else to think about.” Captain McClintock sounded pleased. Of course he did-he’d be giving somebody else the shitty end of the stick. But the ribbons on his chest said he’d done warm work himself. He nodded to Sam. “We need to talk to some people ourselves, Lieutenant. If you stay in port an extra day or two, I’m sure it’ll break your crew’s hearts, won’t it?”
“Sir, you’ll probably hear them crying all the way over in Providence,” Sam said.
That made two or three of the captains snort. McClintock said, “I’m sure I will. All right, Carsten-you’ll hear from us one way or the other before long. You have anything to say before we let you go?”
“Whatever you give me, whatever you give my ship, we’ll take a swing at it,” Sam said. “I guess that’s it. Oh-and my exec is ready for a command of his own. Past ready. I hate to say it because I hate to lose him, but it’s true.”
“We know about Lieutenant Cooley-indeed we do,” the senior captain replied. The others nodded. Just how fast a track was Pat on? McClintock continued, “As for the other-well, plenty of worse things you could tell us. All right-dismissed for now.”
When Sam got back to the Josephus Daniels, Lieutenant Cooley asked, “What’s up, Skipper?”
“Well, I don’t exactly know,” Sam answered. He didn’t say anything about the senior officers’ regard for Cooley. That would come out in its own time, if it did. “Maybe they’ll send us out on patrol again, or maybe they’ll give us something else to do.”
“Something hush-hush and sneaky?” Cooley said. “Something where our ass is grass if the bad guys find out about it?”
“They didn’t say that in so many words,” Sam said. “It sounded that way to me, though. They remembered that time we carried the leathernecks.”
“They would,” the exec said darkly. “They didn’t tell you what, huh?”
“Nope.” Sam shook his head.
“Doesn’t sound good.”
“Nope,” Sam repeated. “Sure doesn’t. Way I figure it, we’ll sail up the James to Richmond, land our Marines to scoop up Jake Featherston, and shell the Tredegar Iron Works while we wait for them to bring the son of a bitch back.”
Cooley looked at him. “I hope you didn’t tell the brass anything like that. They’d take you up on it in a red-hot minute-and if they did, we wouldn’t sail up the James. We’d go up that other creek instead-without a paddle, too.”
“Don’t I know it!” Sam said. “No, I didn’t give them any fancy ideas. I may be dumb, but I’m not that dumb. Besides, they can come up with all kinds of fancy ideas all by themselves. They don’t need any help from me.”
“Maybe they’ll shift the whole crew to a river monitor so we can help when our guys go over the Ohio,” Cooley suggested.
“There’s a cheery thought.” Carsten shivered. During the Great War, both sides put monitors on the Ohio and the Mississippi. Some of them carried guns worthy of a battleship. They gave heavy cannon mobility the big guns couldn’t get any other way, but even then they were vulnerable to mines, which both sides sowed broadcast in the rivers. And monitors were even more vulnerable these days. They were slow and they had little room to maneuver, which meant dive bombers cleaned up on them. Sam supposed he would rather command a river monitor than try to defuse unexploded bombs, but neither job was his idea of fun.
While waiting for orders, Sam did some discreet roistering at places where officers could roister discreetly. He enjoyed himself. He would have had more fun at the raucous joints where he went before he became an officer, but he kept that to himself. A mustang who still behaved like a petty officer wasn’t a good officer. Sam had seen enough men who proved the point.
Pat Cooley plainly had a good time at those discreet establishments. But then, he was an up-and-comer with an Annapolis ring. He was supposed to know how to enjoy himself like a gentleman.
They both happened to be aboard the Josephus Daniels when the orders arrived, as if from On High. Sam read them. Without a word, he passed them on to Cooley. “Well, well,” the exec said brightly when he finished going through them. “Doesn’t this look like fun?”
“Now that you mention it,” Sam said, “no.”
Troop Leader Hipolito Rodriguez was starting to dread duty on the women’s side of Camp Determination. Whenever he went over there, Bathsheba and Antoinette looked for him so they could give him messages to take to Xerxes over on the men’s side. And he had to make up messages from Xerxes to give to them. Otherwise, they would realize the truth.
This is what you get for being kind even once, Rodriguez thought unhappily. He delivered one message. After that, he took the old mallate to the bathhouse. Xerxes didn’t care about anything any more. And he wasn’t about to send messages back to the women’s side on his own.
But how was Rodriguez supposed to tell the man’s wife and daughter that he was dead? He saw no way, however much he wished he did. They would wail and scream and blame him. And he was to blame, too. Didn’t he shepherd everybody in that barracks into the bathhouse? It needed doing; more Negroes filled the building now. Pretty soon, they would get what was coming to them, too.
When Rodriguez sent swarms of men and women he didn’t know into the bathhouse or into the trucks that asphyxiated them, it was only a job, the way planting corn and beans on his farm outside of Baroyeca was only a job. He didn’t think about it; he just did it. Didn’t he back the Freedom Party because it promised to do something about the Negroes in the CSA, and because Jake Featherston kept his promises?
When it came to Bathsheba and Antoinette, though, they weren’t just mallates any more. They were people. And thinking about killing people was much harder and much less pleasant than thinking about getting rid of abstractions, even abstractions with black skins.
Part of him hoped they would go in a population reduction while he was over on the men’s side. Then they would be gone, and he wouldn’t have to worry about it any more. But they kept hanging on. No matter what the guards’ orders were, they didn’t clean out the women’s side as efficiently as the men’s. Even those hard-bitten men found their hearts softening-some, at least.
Naturally, that meant the women’s side got more crowded than the men’s. Just as naturally, Jefferson Pinkard noticed. Rodriguez remembered when Jeff came back from what was plainly a disastrous leave during the Great War. Pinkard went hard and merciless himself after that. He hadn’t changed since-if anything, he was more so now. What with the job he had to do, that wasn’t surprising.
He lectured the guards about not softening up-once. When that didn’t work, he found a new way to solve the problem. A work gang-male prisoners-ran up new barracks on the women’s side of Camp Determination. Before long, new guards filled them. They wore the gray of Freedom Party Guards…but instead of gray tunics and trousers, they wore gray blouses and skirts. Jefferson Pinkard or somebody set above him decided that female guards would be as tough on women as male guards were on men.
And it worked. To Hipolito Rodriguez’s way of thinking, it worked appallingly well. The new guards were all whites-no women from Sonora or Chihuahua. They were all tough-looking; Rodriguez would much rather have dallied with colored prisoners than with any of them. They carried the same submachine guns as their male counterparts, and they knew how to use them.
They wasted no time proving it to the Negro women, either. The first few days they started patrolling the north side of Camp Determination, they shot three women in separate incidents. It was as if they were warning, Don’t give us any guff. You’ll pay for it if you try.
And they didn’t waste any time sending Negro women to the bathhouse on that side and for one-way rides in the asphyxiating trucks. They hardly bothered pretending the eliminations were anything but eliminations. The women’s side began to bubble with terror.
With the female guards building up numbers over there, Rodriguez took a turn on that side less and less often. That wasn’t bad; in a lot of ways, it was a relief. But he didn’t like what he saw when he did a shift there, and he especially didn’t like what he felt. The hair on his arms and at the back of his neck kept wanting to stand on end. That side was an explosion waiting to happen.
Because he was who he was, he had no trouble getting in to see Jeff Pinkard. Saluting his buddy from the trenches always felt funny, but he did it. “What’s on your mind, Hip?” Pinkard asked. “You aren’t one of those people who flabble for the fun of flabbling.”
“I hope not, Senor Jeff,” Rodriguez answered. “But those guards on the women’s side, those lesbianos”-he didn’t know if they were or not, but if some of them weren’t, he’d never seen any-“they make trouble there.”
That got Pinkard’s attention, all right. “How do you mean?” he rapped out.
“They don’t-how you say?-they don’t keep the secret. You make the men do it. The lady guards, they should do the same thing,” Rodriguez said.
Pinkard drummed his fingers on the desk. “That’s not so good.” He got out of his chair, stuck his hat on his head, and grabbed his submachine gun. “I’ll have a look for myself.”
He said that whenever he found a problem. Rodriguez admired him for it. He didn’t let things fester. If something was wrong, he went after it right away. He had no trouble making up his mind.
By that time the next day, three female officers and half a dozen noncoms in skirts were gone. Pinkard assembled the rest of the female Freedom Party guards and spoke to them for most of an hour while men patrolled the women’s half of the camp. Rodriguez never found out exactly what the camp commandant said, but it seemed to do the trick. The female guards stopped being so blatant about what Camp Determination was for. Little by little, the women on that side relaxed-as much as they could relax while not so slowly starving to death.
Bathsheba and Antoinette still survived. The cleanouts missed them again and again. In a way, Rodriguez was glad. They were people to him now, and they hadn’t done anything to deserve death except be born black. He liked the older woman. And the younger one would have been beautiful if she weren’t so thin.
But they reminded him of exactly what he was doing here, and he didn’t like that. Thanks to the hard-hearted female guards, they had a pretty good idea of what would happen to them. “One o’ these days, they gonna put an end to us. Ain’t that right?” Bathsheba asked with no particular fear and no particular hatred.
“Ain’t happened yet. Don’t got to happen.” Rodriguez tried to dodge around the truth.
She wagged a finger at him. “I ain’t nothin’ but a nigger cleanin’ lady, but I ain’t no blind nigger cleanin’ lady. You wave somethin’ in front o’ my face, reckon I see it.”
“I don’t wave nothin’.” He did his best to misunderstand.
She wouldn’t let him. “Don’t reckon it’s any different on the men’s side, is it?”
“I don’t know what you mean. You got women over here, men over there. Of course is different.”
Bathsheba sighed. “I spell it out for you.” She laughed. “I ain’t hardly got my letters, but here I is spellin’ fo’ you. They killin’ folks over yonder the same way they killin’ folks here?”
He didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer. Saying yes would admit far too much. Saying no wouldn’t just be a lie-that wouldn’t bother him a bit-but an obvious lie. Obvious lies were no damn good, not when you were talking about life and death.
When you were talking about life and death, keeping quiet was no damn good, either. Bathsheba sighed again. “Well, I do thank the good Lord fo’ preservin’ my sweet Xerxes along with me an’ Antoinette,” she said. “We is in a hard road, but we is in it together.”
Shame threatened to choke Rodriguez. Along with that shame, though, came an odd pride. Bathsheba and Antoinette still thought Xerxes was alive. That gave them pleasure and hope. And they thought so because of him.
“Ask you somethin’ else?” Bathsheba said.
Rodriguez didn’t sigh, though he felt like it. “Go ahead,” he said, and wondered what sort of trouble her next question would land him in.
“Antoinette give herself to you, it keep her alive any longer?”
The question itself didn’t surprise him. The brutal bluntness of it did. Again, he did his best to evade: “I got a wife at home down in Sonora. I don’t need nobody here.”
“Uh-huh.” Her agreement was more devastating than calling him a liar would have been. And he didn’t tomcat around the women’s side the way a lot of male guards did. Every now and then, yes, but only every now and then.
“Is true. I do,” he said. He usually felt bad after he took a woman here. But not while he did it-oh, no, not then.
“All right.” Bathsheba sounded as if that wasn’t worth quarreling about. She got to the point: “Antoinette give herself to some other guard, then, it keep her alive any longer?”
He couldn’t very well get around that, however much he wanted to. He gave the best answer he could, saying, “Maybe. Ain’t no way to be sure.”
“Ain’t no way to be sure about nothin’, is there?” Somehow, Bathsheba still didn’t sound bitter. “Reckon some o’ them ofays, they think it’s funny to lie down with a girl one day an’ reduce her population the nex’.”
She was righter than she knew, or maybe she knew the way guards’ minds worked much too well. “I never done nothin’ like that,” Rodriguez said. That was true, but it didn’t do him much good. And it didn’t make him sound very good, even to himself.
“Didn’t say you did,” Bathsheba answered. “Wouldn’t’ve asked if I reckoned you was one o’ them. I is pretty much used up. Don’t want to go, mind, but if I gots to, I gots to. But Antoinette, she jus’ startin’ out. You do somethin’ fo’ her, you make an ol’ nigger cleanin’ lady happy.”
“I do what I can.” Rodriguez had no idea how much that would be. “She don’t got to do nothin’ like that for me.”
Bathsheba started to cry. “You is a good man,” she said, even if Rodriguez wasn’t so sure of that himself right now. “You is a decent man. I reckon you is a God-fearin’ man.” She cocked her head to one side and eyed him, the streaks of tears on her cheeks shining in the sun. “So what you doin’ here, doin’ what you doin’?”
He had an answer. He’d always hated mallates, ever since they did their level best to kill him after he put on the Confederate uniform. Like any Freedom Party man, he thought Negroes meant nothing but danger and misfortune for the Confederate States. The country would be better off without them.
But how did he explain that to a colored woman in rags, her hair going all gray, who’d just offered her only daughter to him not for her own sake but for the younger woman’s? How did he explain that to a wife and daughter who loved an old man on the other side of the camp, an old man now dead, an old man whose death Rodriguez didn’t have the heart to tell them about?
He couldn’t explain it. Even trying was a losing fight. He just sighed and said, “I got my job.”
“Don’t seem like reason enough.” Had Bathsheba got mad and screamed at him, he could have lost his temper and stormed off. But she didn’t. And that meant he couldn’t. He had to listen to her instead. He had three stripes on his sleeve and a submachine gun in his hands. She had nothing, and chances were neither she nor her pretty daughter had long to live.
So why did he feel he was the one at a disadvantage? Why did he feel she could call the shots? Why did he wish he were still down on the farm outside of Baroyeca? He didn’t know why. He didn’t like wondering, not even a little bit.
Jake Featherston was not a happy man. Being unhappy was nothing new for him. He ran on discontent, his own and others’, the way a motorcar ran on gasoline. He recalled only two times in his life when he was happy, and neither lasted long: when he took the oath of office as President of the CSA, and when his armies drove all before them pushing north from the Ohio to Lake Erie and cutting the United States in half.
Being President was still pretty good, but it was also a lot more work than he ever thought it would be. Hard work corroded happiness. And Al Smith, damn him, was supposed to lie down with his belly in the air after the Confederates went and licked him. When he didn’t, he dragged Jake and the Confederacy into a long war, the last thing anybody on this side of the border wanted.
Now the CSA would have to take a Yankee punch, too. Jake muttered under his breath. Like any barroom brawler, he wanted to get in the first punch and clean up afterwards, especially when the other guy was bigger. He tried it, and he didn’t knock out the USA. He didn’t have enough to hit again. Standing on the defensive went against every ounce of instinct in him. Instinct or not, sometimes you had no choice.
His secretary looked into his office. “The Attorney General is here to see you, sir.”
“Thank you kindly, Lulu. Bring him in,” Jake said.
Ferd Koenig seemed bigger and bulkier than ever. “Hello, Jake,” he said-he was one of the handful of men these days who could call the President by his first name.
“Hello, Ferd,” Jake answered. “Have a seat. Pour yourself some coffee if you want to.” A pot sat on a hot plate in the corner. Jake smacked a desk drawer. “Or I’ve got a fifth in here if you’d rather have that.”
“Coffee’ll do.” Koenig fixed himself a cup, then sat down. After a sip, he said, “Want to thank you for letting that Freedom Party Guard unit go into action in west Texas. They’ve done a pretty good job.”
“Better than I expected, to tell you the truth,” Featherston said. “You want to pick up recruiting for your combat wing, I won’t tell you no.”
“Thanks, Mr. President. With your kind permission, I will do that,” Koenig said. “We need a fire brigade when things get hot.”
“That’s a fact. Other fact is, some of the generals are getting jumpy. I can feel it,” Jake said. “A counterweight to the Army could come in goddamn handy one of these days. You never can tell.”
“Lord, isn’t that the truth?” Koenig set the coffee cup on the desk. “Pour me a shot in there after all, would you?”
“Help yourself.” Jake got out the bottle and slid it across the desk. “Shame to do that to good sippin’ whiskey, but suit yourself.”
“I want the jolt, but I run on coffee these days.” Koenig added a hefty slug of bourbon, then tasted. He nodded. “Yeah, that’ll do the trick.” He eyed Jake. “You really mean that about the Guards units?”
“Hell, yes.” Jake poured himself a shot, too, only without the coffee. He raised the glass. “Mud in your eye.” After a respectful drink-he couldn’t just knock it back, not after he called it sipping whiskey-he went on, “If Party guards aren’t loyal, nobody will be. You raise those units, and by God I’ll see they’re equipped with the best we’ve got.”
“Army won’t like it,” the Attorney General predicted.
“Fuck the Army,” Featherston said. “That’s the whole point. So what else have we got going on?”
“Did you forget?” Ferd Koenig asked. “Day after tomorrow, we clean out Richmond. Isn’t it about time the Confederate States had a nigger-free capital?”
“Oh, I remember, all right. You don’t need to worry about that,” Jake said. “All the cops and stalwarts and guards are geared up for it.” He chuckled. “With the niggers gone, we won’t need so many of those people around here. We can put some of ’em in the Army-and in your Party Guards outfits-and some in the factories, and we’ll be better off both ways.”
“If we didn’t have all those Mexicans coming in, we’d never be able to make enough to stay in the war,” Koenig said.
“Yeah, well, that’s the carrot we give Francisco Jose,” Jake answered. “He gives us soldiers to fight the niggers in the countryside, we keep the frontier open for his workers. That’s his safety valve, like. They get jobs here instead of going hungry down in Mexico and stirring up trouble against him. He gives us a hard time, we close the border…and start shipping the rebels old bolt-action Tredegars we don’t need any more. His old man made it through a civil war-we can see how he likes another one.” His laugh held all the cynicism in the world.
“Sounds like you’ve got that under control, all right.” Koenig’s role was domestic. He didn’t presume to mess around with foreign affairs. He had his place, he knew it, he was good at it, and he kept to it, all of which made him uniquely valuable to Jake Featherston. He added, “The sooner we clean out all the niggers, the sooner we can throw everything we’ve got at the USA.”
“That’s the idea, all right,” Jake agreed. Koenig didn’t know anything about the uranium bomb. Featherston didn’t tell him anything, either. That secret couldn’t be too tightly held. He did say, “Starting day after tomorrow, Richmond’ll be a better place. You go in right at sunup like usual?”
“That’s what I’ve got in mind. We’ll have all day to move ’em out then. Yankee bombers aren’t likely to complicate things by daylight, either,” Koenig answered, and Jake nodded. As far as he was concerned, the difference between day and night was largely arbitrary. He’d always been a night owl, and spending so much time underground only encouraged him to catnap around the clock.
He was asleep at sunrise the day the cleanout started, but he got a wakeup call: literally, for the telephone by his cot jangled. That telephone didn’t ring unless something big was going on. He grabbed it in the middle of the second ring. “Featherston,” he said hoarsely, and then, “What the fuck have the damnyankees done to us now?”
“Not the damnyankees, Mr. President.” Ferd Koenig’s voice was on the other end of the line. “It’s the goddamn niggers. We’ve got…” He paused, maybe looking for a way to sugarcoat what came next, but he almost always did speak his mind, and this morning proved no exception: “We’ve got an uprising on our hands.”
Jake sat bolt upright. “What’s going on? Fill me in fast.”
“Damn smokes must’ve known we were coming for ’em,” the Attorney General answered. “We’ve already had, I dunno, six or eight people bombs go off. They’ve got rifles and grenades and Featherston Fizzes and a couple of machine guns, anyway. They mined the streets into the colored quarter, the sneaky bastards, and they blew two armored cars to hell and gone. It’s a fight, sir, nothing else but.”
“Son of a bitch. Son of a motherfucking bitch,” Jake Featherston said. “All right, if they want a fight, they can damn well have one. Let me get hold of the War Department. If we have to, we’ll blow up the whole nigger part of town”-basically, southeast Richmond-“and all the coons inside it. That’ll do, by God.” He sounded as if he looked forward to it. The reason for that was simple: he did.
“All right, Mr. President. I wanted to let you know,” Koenig said.
“Well, now I know. Get off the line, and I’ll get you what you need to finish the job.” Jake waited till the Attorney General hung up, then called Nathan Bedford Forrest III. He wasn’t surprised to find the chief of the General Staff at his desk. “Forrest, the niggers are raising a ruckus. What can we pull from north of here to squash those stinking, backstabbing shitheels flat?”
“Well, sir, there is a problem with that,” Forrest said slowly. “If we pull too much or make it too obvious what we’re doing, the damnyankees are liable to try and break through up there. They’re liable to make it, too-we’re already stretched pretty damn thin north of the city.”
“They won’t do it.” Jake sounded very sure. He wondered why. Then he found an answer: “They’re building up out West, not right here. You know that as well as I do.” He even thought he was telling the truth. And he added, “Besides, we can’t let the niggers get away with this kind of crap, or we’ll have trouble from here to fucking Guaymas. I want men. I want armor. I want artillery. And I want Asskickers. By the time they all get done, won’t be a nigger left on his feet in there.”
He waited. If Nathan Bedford Forrest III did any more bitching, the C.S. General Staff would have a new chief in nothing flat. Forrest must have sensed as much, too, for he said, “All right, Mr. President. They’ll get here as fast as they can.”
“Faster than that,” Featherston said, but it was only reflex complaint; Forrest had satisfied him. He slammed down the telephone, quickly dressed, and did something he didn’t do every day: he went up above ground.
Shockoe Hill gave him a good vantage point. When he looked southeast, he swore at the black smoke rising over the colored part of Richmond. He heard the rattle of small-arms fire and the occasional explosion, too. “Christ!” he said. The police and stalwarts and Party Guards always came loaded for bear, just in case. Well, they found a bear and then some this time.
Nathan Bedford Forrest III proved good as his word. About half an hour later, the first Mule dive bombers screamed down out of the sky above the colored quarter. Whatever the blacks had in the way of small arms, they didn’t have any antiaircraft guns. The flat, harsh crump! of bursting bombs echoed across Richmond.
But the Confederate Asskickers weren’t the only airplanes in the sky. U.S. fighters, flying at not much above rooftop level, darted over southeastern Richmond to strafe the people cleaning out the Negroes. Then they zoomed away to the north again.
Jake Featherston did some more swearing at that, swearing sulfurous enough to make his guards and the crews of the antiaircraft guns on the cratered Gray House grounds stare at him in startled admiration. He didn’t know whether the damnyankees had urged Richmond’s Negroes to rise. He didn’t know, and he hardly cared. He did know they had good spies inside the city, to hear about it and take advantage of it so fast.
He called for his driver and pointed toward the trouble. “Take me down there, quick as you can.”
“Uh, yes, Mr. President.” The driver saluted. But then he went on, “Sir, what good will you be able to do there? You don’t want to give the coons a shot at you.”
“Don’t tell me what I want to do,” Jake snapped. “Just get moving, goddammit.”
The driver did. People were in the habit of doing what Jake Featherston said. A good thing, too, he thought. A damn good thing. Twenty minutes later, he was at what was for all practical purposes the fighting front. He found Ferd Koenig looking ridiculous with a helmet on his jowly head. A moment later, when a bullet cracked past, Featherston wished for a helmet of his own-not that any helmet ever made would stop a direct hit.
“It’s a war, Mr. President,” Koenig said unhappily.
“I see that.” Featherston wasn’t unhappy. He was furious. If the Negroes thought they could get away with this, they needed to think again. “Send in everybody we’ve got,” he told Koenig. “This has to be stamped out right now.”
“Shouldn’t we wait till the soldiers get here?” the Attorney General asked, licking his lips. “Been kind of hot for the manpower we have.”
“Send them in,” Featherston repeated. “When we have the soldiers later, we’ll use ’em. But if we can end it in a hurry, we’ll do that. We’ve already got the Asskickers in action. What more do you want, egg in your beer?”
So the attack went in. And the Negro fighters, waiting in prepared positions, shredded it. Wounded whites staggered back out of the fighting. So did overage cops who looked as if they were on the point of having heart attacks. They killed some Negroes and brought out some others, but they didn’t break the line. Jake Featherston swore yet again. Now he’d have to do it the hard way.
From the bridge, Sam Carsten looked at the Josephus Daniels with a kind of fond dismay. They’d done strange things to his ship. Her paint was the wrong shade of gray. Sheet metal changed the outline of the bridge and the gun turrets. Her sailors wore whites of the wrong cut. His own uniform was dark gray, not blue, and so were the rest of the officers’.
By the name painted on both sides of her bow, the Josephus Daniels was the CSS Hot Springs, a Confederate destroyer escort operating in the North Atlantic. The main danger coming south from Boston was that she would run into a U.S. patrol aircraft or submersible and get sunk by her own side. The Confederate naval ensign, a square version of the C.S. battle flag, completed the disguise.
“If they capture us, they’ll shoot us for spies.” Lieutenant Pat Cooley didn’t sound worried. He was almost childishly excited at playing dress-up. The possibility of getting shot hardly seemed real to him.
It didn’t seem real to Sam, either, but for a different reason. “Not a whole lot of POWs off Navy ships,” he said. “If something goes wrong, they’ll just damn well sink us.” That wasn’t romantic. It had no cloak-and-dagger flavor to it. He didn’t care. It was real.
By now, barring bad luck, they were too far south for U.S. airplanes to harry them. Subs were always a risk, but Sam didn’t know what to do about it except monitor the hydrophones as closely as he could. The crew was doing that.
He had the best set of C.S. Navy recognition signals his U.S. Navy superiors could give him. He also had an ace in the hole, a deserter from the CSA named Antonio Jones. Normally, Sam would have been leery about a Confederate traitor. Anybody like that was too likely to be playing a double game. But he-and, again, his superiors-had a good reason for thinking Jones reliable.
The man was black as the ace of spades.
He came from Cuba, the only state in the CSA where Negroes had surnames. He pronounced his “Hone-ace”: he spoke English with an accent half Confederate drawl, half syrupy Cubano Spanish. He hated the homeland he’d left behind, and he burned to go back there. And so here he was, with a disguised destroyer escort for transport…among other things.
“Not the first time I’ve been in the gun-running business,” Carsten remarked.
“No?” the exec said, as he was supposed to.
“Nope. I took rifles into Ireland in the last go-round, just to help keep England busy,” Sam said. “The Irish paid us off in whiskey. Don’t expect that’ll happen in Cuba.”
“No, suh,” Antonio Jones said. He wore a mess steward’s uniform. High cheekbones and a strong nose argued for a little Indian blood in him. “But maybe you get some rum.”
“Oh, I won’t,” Sam said. “That’ll be for the fellows who do the real work. Long as they don’t get drunk and disorderly, I’ll look the other way.”
Pat Cooley raised an eyebrow, but lowered it again in a hurry. A lot of skippers would do the same thing, not just a man who was a mustang. The exec contented himself with saying, “Let’s hope they have the chance to drink it.”
“Not all these little tricks are easy,” Sam said. “We just have to do what we can and hope for the best, same as always.”
They were off the coast of South Carolina when a seaplane of unfamiliar design buzzed out to look them over. The mock Confederate sailors ran to their guns. With luck, that wouldn’t alarm the fliers in the seaplane, which also sported the Confederate battle flag on wings, fuselage, and tail.
After a couple of passes, the seaplane waggled its wings at the pseudo-Hot Springs and flew away. “Let’s just hope it didn’t fly low enough to read our name,” Pat Cooley said.
“I don’t think it did.” Sam hoped he wasn’t whistling in the dark. The people the seaplane wirelessed probably wouldn’t be surprised to find a C.S. destroyer escort in these waters. They probably would be surprised to find the Hot Springs around here. They also probably wouldn’t be very happy. The Josephus Daniels wasn’t fast enough to run away from everything they’d throw at her. She wasn’t armed well enough to fight it off, either. All she could do was go down swinging.
“Y’all are bueno?” Antonio Jones asked.
“Well, I’ll tell you-if we’re not, we’ll know pretty damn quick.” Sam went from the bridge to the wireless shack. “Any Confederate traffic for us or about us?” he asked the men with earphones.
“Nothing for us, sir,” one of the yeomen answered. “If there’s anything about us, it’s not in clear.”
“If it’s in code, chances are we’re shafted,” Sam said. “All right-thanks.” He returned to his station, at least somewhat reassured.
Another seaplane examined them when they neared the southern tip of Florida. They must have passed that inspection, too. If they hadn’t, cruisers and land-based dive bombers would have called on them. As far as Sam knew-as far as anybody in the U.S. Navy knew-the Confederates had no airplane carriers. It made sense that they wouldn’t; they didn’t need that kind of navy. Land-based air and coast-defense ships could keep the United States from mounting major operations against them, and submarines let them strike at the USA from far away.
“You know what our best chance is?” Sam said as the Josephus Daniels neared the northeastern coast of Cuba.
“Sure,” his exec answered. “Our best chance is that the Confederates won’t figure we’re crazy enough to try anything like this in the first place.”
“Just what I was thinking-maybe we ought to get married,” Sam said.
“Sorry, sir. No offense, but you’re not my type,” Cooley answered. They both laughed.
Antonio Jones looked from one of them to the other. “This ain’t funny, amigos,” he said. “What that Featherston bastard is doing to colored people in my estado, it’s a shame and a disgrace. We got to go to the mountains and fight back.”
“Sorry, Mr. Jones.” Sam didn’t think he’d ever called a Negro mister before, but orders were to treat him like a big shot. “We know your people are in trouble. We’re not laughing about that. But my crew is in trouble, too, and it will be till we get back into U.S. waters.” And even after that, he added, but only to himself. “We can laugh about that. We’d go nuts if we didn’t, chances are.”
“Ah. Now I understand.” Jones sketched a salute. “All right, Senor Capitan. We do this, too, against our worries.”
The sun sank into the sea with tropical abruptness. No long, lazy twilights in these latitudes; darkness came on in a hurry. Pat Cooley had the conn as the Josephus Daniels approached the Cuban coast. Sam didn’t want to risk the ship in any way he didn’t have to. What they were doing was already risky enough by the nature of things.
“One patrol boat where it’s not supposed to be could ruin our whole day,” Cooley remarked.
“All the guns are manned, and Y-ranging should let us see him before he sees us,” Sam said. “With luck, we’ll sink him before he gets word off about us.”
Cooley nodded. Sam wondered how much luck they’d already used up when those C.S. seaplanes believed they were what they pretended to be. Did they have enough left? He’d find out before long.
Y-ranging gear also let them spot the Cuban coast. Although it was blacked out, the darkness wasn’t so thorough as it would have been farther north. U.S. bombers weren’t likely to visit here. Eyeing what had to be two fair-sized towns, Sam said, “That’s Guardalavaca to starboard, and that has to be Banes to starboard. We are where we’re supposed to be. Nice navigating, Mr. Cooley.”
“Thank you very much, sir,” the exec said.
Sailors were hauling crates of rifles and submachine guns and machine guns and cartridges up on deck. Soon they’d be lowered into the Josephus Daniels’ boats and brought ashore…if the destroyer escort got the recognition signal she was supposed to.
That thought had hardly crossed Carsten’s mind before three automobiles on a beach aimed their headlights across the water in the warship’s general direction. Antonio Jones breathed a sigh of relief. Sam breathed another one. Anxiety tempered his-were they sailing into a trap? He had to find out.
“Thank you, sir,” the black Cuban answered. “God willing”-he crossed himself-“the Partido de Libertad here will have some new worries.” They went out on deck together. Sailors in ersatz Confederate uniforms swung crate after crate down into the waiting boats. Jones continued, “It is not as much white man against black man here as it is on the mainland of the CSA. There are many of mixed blood on this island, and even some whites help us as much as they can.”
“Good. That’s good, Mr. Jones.” Sam did his best to pronounce it the way the Negro did. He was uneasily aware that his own country wasn’t doing everything it could to help the Negroes in the Confederate States. Well, the United States were doing something. The proof of that was right here. Sailors scrambled down nets to board the boats and take the guns and ammo ashore.
Antonio Jones went to the port rail to go down himself. “I hope you stay safe, Capitan Carsten,” he said.
“I hope you do, too,” Sam said. “Maybe after the war’s done, we’ll get together and talk about it over a beer.”
“I hope so, yes.” Jones sketched a salute and swung himself over the rail. He descended as nimbly as any sailor. Motors chugging, the boats pulled away from the Josephus Daniels and went in toward the beach.
Nothing to do but wait, Sam thought. He would rather be doing. He’d smuggled arms into Ireland himself. He knew the ploy worked right away. If firing broke out on the beach now…Well, in that case I’m screwed, too.
The boats came back after what felt like years. His watch insisted it was more like forty-five minutes. Sailors hoisted the boats up one after another. “Smooth as rum, sir,” said one of the men back from the beach. The simile made Sam suspicious, or more than suspicious. Remembering the good Irish whiskey he’d downed in the last war, he said not a word.
“Goddamnedest thing you ever saw, too,” a grizzled CPO added. “They had this kid running things on the beach. If he was a day over sixteen, I’m a nigger. But he knew what was what, Fidel did. He gave orders in that half-Spanish, half-English they talk here, and people jumped like you wouldn’t believe. He was a white kid, too, not a smoke like Mr. Antonio Jones.”
“Jones said whites and blacks were in it together down here,” Sam said. “Do we have all the boats aboard? If we do, we better get out of here.”
They did. The Josephus Daniels made for the open ocean. Aboard her, sailors put on their own uniforms for the first time since setting out from Boston. They started dismantling the sheet-metal camouflage that turned her into a Confederate ship. When morning came, they would give her a proper paint job, too. They couldn’t bring her back into U.S. waters looking the way she did, not unless they wanted her sent to the bottom in short order.
“We got away with it,” Sam said to Pat Cooley.
“Did you think we wouldn’t, sir?” Cooley asked.
“Well, I’m damn glad we did,” Sam said, and let it go at that.
Clarence Potter fitted a new clip to his Tredegar automatic rifle. He worked the bolt to chamber the first round. That done, he was ready to empty the twenty-five-round clip into anything that looked even a little bit like trouble.
The Negro uprising in Richmond was having unexpected effects. One of them was reminding even officers who normally spent their time deep in the bowels of the War Department that war meant fighting, and fighting meant killing. Nathan Bedford Forrest III’s great-grandfather first said that, and the cavalry general from the War of Secession knew what he was talking about.
Small bands of blacks had managed to get out through the barbed-wire perimeter that was supposed to seal the colored quarter off from the outside world. Bombed-out buildings gave them hiding places uncountable during the day. When night fell, they came out and shot whoever they could find. Rumor said a Negro’d come close to killing Jake Featherston. Potter didn’t know if he believed rumor. He didn’t know how he felt about it even if it was true, either. He didn’t love the President of the CSA, but he knew the country needed him.
His own foxhole was just inside the colored district. “Come on!” he shouted to the Confederate soldiers entering the perimeter. “They’re shooting back from over there, and from over there, too.” The Virginia Confederate Seminary ordained black preachers; it was as close to an institution of higher learning as Negroes could have in the CSA. For now, its large, solid buildings made a splendid strongpoint for Negroes armed with old-fashioned bolt-action Tredegars, sporting rifles, shotguns, pistols, and whatever else they could get their hands on.
They even had a few mortars, perhaps captured, perhaps homemade, perhaps sneaked in by the damnyankees. But what they had was no match for the artillery, barrels, and air power the Confederacy used against them, to say nothing of the ground troops clearing them out one block, one building, at a time.
More Confederates, some in gray, some in butternut, led a long column of black captives out of the colored district. Any time a Negro hesitated, a soldier or Freedom Party guard shot him-or her. If Asskickers bombed apartment blocks into rubble, who could say how many people died in the explosions or in the fires that followed? And who cared, except the Negroes themselves? Anybody blown to bits now didn’t need shipping to a camp later. Population reduction came in all different flavors.
Antiaircraft guns started going off. Clarence Potter swore and dove into a foxhole. The Yankees sent fighters into Richmond whenever they could. Helping the black uprising was good for them, just as helping the Mormons helped the CSA. But the U.S. border was much closer to Richmond than the Confederates were to Salt Lake City. Too bad, Potter thought.
The U.S. fighters came in low, the way they always did. They blasted whatever they could, then roared off. A few bullets slammed into the sandbags that helped strengthen Potter’s foxhole. Dirt leaked out of them and onto him.
Leaking dirt he didn’t mind. Leaking blood was a different story. Potter straightened up again when he was reasonably sure the enemy airplanes were gone. A latecomer shot past then, but didn’t open up on him. He let out a sigh of relief. That could have been…unpleasant.
“Potter!” someone yelled. “Potter!”
“I’m here!” Clarence Potter shouted back. By Jake Featherston’s orders, no one named anyone else’s rank inside the perimeter. Shouting out for a general only made the man a tempting target for snipers. Quite a few officers and even noncoms didn’t wear their rank badges for the same reason. Potter did, but more from a sense of fussy precision than out of vanity.
He kept calling till the runner found his foxhole. “Here you are, sir,” the man said, and handed him a sealed envelope.
“Thanks,” Potter said. Things did happen outside this colored district, though proving as much wasn’t easy, not when the capital was on fire. He broke the seal, took out the papers inside it, read through them, and nodded to himself. “So that’s ready to get going, is it?”
“I don’t know what you mean, sir,” the runner said. “Do I need to take an answer back to anybody?”
“No, that’s all right. This just lets me know something’s going to happen. You can leave,” Potter answered. The young Confederate soldier didn’t seem sorry to disappear. No doubt he would have been happier running messages through the War Department’s miles of underground corridors. Potter couldn’t blame him. Rifle and machine-gun bullets hardly ever flew down those corridors. Here, now…
Well, he’d got this message where it needed to go. Potter lit a match and burned it. Confederate bombers flying out of extreme northwestern Sonora were going to try to hit the U.S. uranium works in western Washington. It was a gamble in all kinds of ways. Other C.S. bombers taking off at the same time would head toward Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Denver. With luck, the damnyankees’ fancy electronics-better than anything the CSA had-would make them concentrate on those other bombers, not on the ones that really counted.
With a little more luck, the bombers would do some real damage when they got over the target. They had to fly a long way to get there: something on the order of 1,200 miles. The Confederacy didn’t have long-range heavy bombers that could carry a big bomb load that far and then turn around and fly home. If the war broke out in 1945, say, instead of 1941, the Confederacy probably would have such airplanes. But the country needed to use what it could get its hands on now.
Even starting out with a light bomb load, those bombers wouldn’t be coming home again. They would land at a strip on Vancouver Island, a strip of whose existence the United States were-Potter fervently hoped-ignorant. Assuming everything went the way it was supposed to, pilots and aircrews would eventually get smuggled back to the Confederacy. Canadian rebels would wreck the aircraft so the USA couldn’t learn much from them. (So the Canucks claimed, anyhow. If they found people to fly those birds against the damnyankees, Potter suspected they would. He didn’t mind. He wished them luck.)
Assuming everything went the way it was supposed to…Clarence Potter laughed, not that it was funny. Things had a habit of going wrong. Any soldier, and especially any soldier in the intelligence business, could testify to that.
He laughed again. Assuming everything went the way it was supposed to, Richmond’s Negroes would all be in camps by now. Assuming everything went the way it was supposed to, Potter himself would be back under the War Department figuring out sneaky ways to make life miserable for the damnyankees and to keep them from making it miserable for his own country. That knowledge didn’t give him any great faith things would go the way they were supposed to.
But the Confederate States had to try. The United States started the race towards uranium sooner, and they were running faster. They had more trained people to attack the problem, and they had more industrial capacity to spare from straight-out, short-term war production.
“Thank you, Professor FitzBelmont,” Potter muttered, there in his foxhole. Who would have thought an unworldly physicist would see something a spymaster missed? Physics was FitzBelmont’s business, but all the same…
Even if everything did go the way it was supposed to, how long would this raid stall the United States? Days? Weeks? Months? Potter laughed at himself. He couldn’t know ahead of time. Neither could anybody else.
“The longer, the better,” Potter said. And that was the Lord’s truth. One raid on that facility might get through. A follow-up seemed unlikely to.
More Negroes came back past his foxhole. They were skinny and dirty. Despair etched their faces. They’d done everything they could to hold off the Confederate authorities. They’d done everything they could, and it wasn’t enough. Plenty of their friends and loved ones lay dead in the rubble from which they were pulled, and now they were going off to the camps in spite of everything.
Potter felt like waving good-bye to them. He didn’t-that was asking for a bullet. But the temptation lingered. Too bad, fools!
Of course, if the damnyankees won this war as they’d won the last one, they would jeer the Confederates the same way. And they would have won the right. Potter tried to imagine what the Confederate States would be like with U.S. soldiers occupying them. He grimaced. It wouldn’t be pretty. The Yankees got soft after the Great War. They paid for it, too. They weren’t as dumb as most Confederates thought they were. They weren’t dumb enough to make the same mistake twice in a row. If they came down on the CSA this time around, they’d come down with both feet.
Of itself, Potter’s gaze swung to the west, toward Washington University. How were Professor FitzBelmont and his crew of scientists doing? How much time did they need? How far ahead of them were their U.S. opposite numbers? How long would the C.S. bombers set the damnyankees back?
There. He was back where he started from. He had lots of good questions, and no good answers.
Rattling and clanking, a couple of Confederate barrels ground forward against the rebellious Negroes. They were obsolescent machines left over from the early days of the war: only two-inch guns, poorly sloped armor. Having to use them-and their highly trained crews-for internal-security work was galling just the same.
A machine gun in the ruins of a grocery opened up on the barrels. That wasn’t a C.S. weapon; it came from the USA. Its slower rate of fire made it immediately recognizable. Potter cursed under his breath. Yes, the damnyankees helped the Negro revolt in the CSA, the same as the Confederates helped the Mormons. But the Mormon uprising was fizzling out, while Negroes went right on causing trouble.
Bullets ricocheted off the forward barrel’s turret and glacis plate, some of them striking sparks from the armor. Even experienced soldiers tried to knock out barrels with machine guns, and it couldn’t be done. A Confederate infantryman fired an antibarrel rocket into the battered store. The machine gun suddenly fell silent. Antibarrel rockets were made for piercing armor plate. Confederate soldiers had quickly discovered they also made excellent housebreakers.
The barrels clattered on. When somebody with a rifle fired at them, the lead barrel sprayed the house from which he was shooting with machine-gun fire. But that rifleman was only a distraction. A skinny Negro kid-he couldn’t have been more than fourteen-leaped up onto the second barrel, yanked open the hatch over the cupola, and threw in a Featherston Fizz.
A C.S. foot soldier with a submachine gun cut him down a moment later-a moment too late. Flames and black, greasy smoke burst from all the turret hatches. The gunner got out, but he was on fire. He took only a few steps before crumpling to the ground, and writhed like a moth that flew into a gas flame.
Then the barrel brewed up as its ammunition cooked off. Fire burst from it. Potter knew the commander and loader were stuck in there. He didn’t think the driver or bow gunner got out, either.
Five good men gone. Five men who wouldn’t fight the USA again. Five men the CSA couldn’t afford to lose-but they were lost. Clarence Potter swore one more time. To his way of thinking, this proved the Confederacy had to get rid of its Negroes. What did they do but cause trouble and grief?
What the Confederacy might be if it treated Negroes like men and women rather than beasts…never even crossed his mind.