The Victorious Opposition (81 page)
“Don’t you worry about it,” Jake answered. “Don’t you worry about it one little bit, on account of I just heaved Jerry Voorhis out of Richmond.”
“Oh.” Russell sounded relieved, at least for one word. But then he said, “Holy Jesus, Mr. President, is there gonna be another war?”
“Not if we get what we want,” Featherston said. “Get what’s ours by rights, I ought to say.” As far as he was concerned, there was no difference between the one and the other.
“All right, then, Mr. President. I’ll see you back there soon,” Russell said. “I sure as hell hope everything goes the way you want it to.”
“It will.” Jake never had any doubts.
Why should I?
he thought.
Everything’s always gone good up till now. It won’t change.
He spent a few more minutes calming the ambassador down, then hung up the phone on him.
No sooner had he done that than Lulu poked her head into his office and said, “General Potter is here to see you, sir.”
“Is he?” Jake grinned. “Well, send him right on in.”
“Good morning, Mr. President,” Clarence Potter said, saluting. He carried a manila folder under his left arm. Tossing it onto Featherston’s desk, he went on, “Here are some of the latest photographs we’ve got.”
“Out-fucking-standing!” Jake said, which produced an audible sniff from Lulu in the outer office. “These are what I want to see, all right. If you have to, you’ll walk me through some of them.”
Some of the pictures that Potter brought him were aerial photos. Getting reconnaissance airplanes up over the USA wasn’t that hard. Every so often, Featherston wondered how many flying spies the United States had above his own country. Too many, probably. The photographs Potter brought him were neatly labeled, each one showing exactly where and when it had been taken.
“Doesn’t look like there’s a whole lot of change,” Jake remarked. “Everything still seems out in the open.”
“Yes, sir,” Potter answered.
Something in his tone made Jake’s head come up. He might have been a wolf taking a scent. “All right,” he said. “What’s different in the stuff they don’t want us to see?”
He almost laughed at the way Potter looked at him. The Intelligence officer didn’t want to respect him, but couldn’t help it.
Yeah, sonny boy, I run this country for a reason,
Jake thought. Potter said, “If you’ll look at some of these ground shots, Mr. President, you’ll see the Yankees are starting to move up into concealed forward positions. They should have done it sooner, but they are starting.”
“How did we get these ground photos back here so fast?” Featherston asked. “Some of ’em are from yesterday morning.”
“Sir, we’re still at peace with the USA,” Potter replied. “If a drummer or a tourist crosses back into Kentucky from Illinois or Indiana or Ohio, who’s to say what kind of prints are on his Brownie? They’re only just now starting to wake up to the idea that we might really mean this.” He couldn’t resist adding, “It might have been better if we’d left them even more in the dark.”
Nobody criticized Jake Featherston to his face and got away with it. “Listen, Potter,” he snapped, “the damnyankees’ll get more surprises from me than a fellow does from his doctor after he lays a fifty-cent whore.” The other man guffawed in surprise. Jake went on, “You don’t know all my business, so don’t go making like you do.”
He waited to see if Potter would get angry or get sniffy. The other man didn’t. Instead, he nodded. “All right. That makes sense. Does anybody know all your secrets? Besides you, I mean?”
“Hell, no,” Jake answered automatically. “There are things I could brag about—but I won’t.” If he hadn’t checked himself, he might have started boasting about what was going on down in Louisiana, for instance. But the whole point of knowing things other people didn’t was to be able to use what you knew against them and to keep them from using what they knew against you.
Clarence Potter, he saw, got that. Well, Potter was in Intelligence. If anybody could see the point of secrets, he was the man. And he nodded now. “When I first got to know you, you would have run your mouth,” he said. “There’s more to you than there used to be. That’s why I’m here, I expect.”
“Instead of still being a goddamn stubborn Whig and wanting to blow my head off, you mean?” Featherston asked.
Potter nodded. He smiled a crooked smile. “Yeah. Instead of that.” The smile got wider. Now he was waiting—waiting to find out if Jake would send him off to a camp for admitting it.
And Jake wanted to. But Potter, damn him, had made himself too useful to be jugged like a hare. And from now on he’d be too busy to worry about blowing the head off of anybody who wasn’t wearing a green-gray uniform. Jake jerked a thumb at the door. “All right. Get the hell out of here, and take all your pictures of naked women with you.”
“Yes, sir.” Chuckling, Potter scooped up the folder of reconnaissance photos and started out. He paused with his hand on the doorknob. “Good luck,” he said. “You’ve done everything you could to get us ready, but we’ll still need it.”
“I’ll put in a fresh requisition with the Quartermaster Corps,” Jake said. Potter nodded and left. Jake shook his head in bemusement. He might have made stupid jokes like that with Ferd Koenig and a couple of other old-time Party buddies, but not with anybody else. So why make them with Potter?
But he didn’t need long to find the answer. He’d known Potter longer than he’d known Koenig or any of the other Party men. They’d both hung tough when the Army of Northern Virginia was falling to pieces all around them. If the president of the greatest country in North America—no, in the
world
!—couldn’t joke around with the one man who’d known him when he was just a sergeant, with whom could he joke? Nobody. Nobody at all.
If the Confederate States were going to become the greatest country in the world, they had to go through the United States first.
Bastards beat us once, when the niggers stabbed us in the back,
Jake thought.
This time, I’ll sit on the niggers but good, right from the start. Let’s see those damnyankee fuckers do it again, especially when we’re ready—when
I’m
ready—and they aren’t quite
. The photos Potter had shown him proved that.
Lulu made most of his telephone calls. He made this one himself, on a special line that didn’t pass through her desk. It went straight from his office to the War Department. Men checked twice a day to make sure the damnyankees didn’t tap it. It rang only once before the Chief of the General Staff picked it up. “Forrest speaking.”
“Featherston,” Jake said, and then, “Blackbeard.” He hung up.
There. It was done. The die was cast. Whatever was going to happen would happen . . . starting tomorrow morning,
early
tomorrow morning.
Summer had just come in. Jake worked through the rest of June 21. He ate supper, and then went right on working through the night. Lulu brought him cup after cup of coffee. After a while, yawning, she went home to bed. He worked on, behind blackout curtains that kept light from leaking out of the Gray House and showing where it was from the air.
June 21 passed into June 22. All that coffee made Jake’s heart thud and soured his stomach. He gulped a Bromo-Seltzer and went on. At a quarter past three, the drone of airplane engines and the thunder of distant artillery—not distant enough; damn those Yankee robbers!—made him whoop for sheer glee. He’d waited so long. Now his day was here.
BOOKS BY HARRY TURTLEDOVE
The Guns of the South
THE WORLDWAR SAGA
Worldwar: In the Balance
Worldwar: Tilting the Balance
Worldwar: Upsetting the Balance
Worldwar: Striking the Balance
COLONIZATION
Colonization: Second Contact
Colonization: Down to Earth
Colonization: Aftershocks
THE VIDESSOS CYCLE
The Misplaced Legion
An Emperor for the Legion
The Legion of Videssos
Swords of the Legion
THE TALE OF KRISPOS
Krispos Rising
Krispos of Videssos
Krispos the Emperor
THE TIME OF TROUBLES SERIES
The Stolen Throne
Hammer and Anvil
The Thousand Cities
Videssos Besieged
Noninterference
Kaleidoscope
A World of Difference
Earthgrip
Departures
How Few Remain
THE GREAT WAR
The Great War: American Front
The Great War: Walk in Hell
The Great War: Breakthroughs
American Empire: Blood and Iron
American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold
American Empire: The Victorious Opposition
is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A Del Rey
®
Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2003 by Harry Turtledove
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Turtledove, Harry.
American empire—the victorious opposition / Harry Turtledove.
p. cm.
1. North America—Fiction. 2. Imperialism—Fiction. I. Title:
Victorious opposition. II. Title.
PS3570.U76A84 2003
813’.54—dc21 2003043687
eISBN: 978-0-345-46450-7
v3.0