Drive to the East (24 page)

By then, all the shells were coming in astern of the
Josephus Daniels.
When the Confederates realized as much, they ceased fire.

“Now we’re home free, if one of their airplanes doesn’t find us,” Sam said.

“You’re full of cheerful thoughts, aren’t you, sir?” Cooley said.

“Like a sardine can is full of sardines, son,” Sam answered. “Straighten out and head for home. I’m gong to assess the damage. Keep straight unless we’re attacked. If they jump us before I’m back to the bridge—” He broke off again. “Belay that. I’ll take the conn.
You
go assess the damage and report back.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Cooley didn’t question him. The
Josephus Daniels
was
his,
Sam Carsten’s, no one else’s. Responsibility for her was his, too. He couldn’t stand the idea of anything happening if he wasn’t there when it did. Cooley said, “I’ll hustle, sir.”

Sam stared at the Y-range screens as the ship sped up toward Maryland. No aircraft heading his way, nothing on the water. He didn’t think the Confederates had anything bigger than a torpedo boat operating in the bay, but a torpedo boat could ruin you if you didn’t spot it till too late.

Cooley came back. “Sir, looks like four to six dead, a couple of dozen wounded. We’ve got one wrecked 40mm mount—that’s the worst of the damage. The rest is mostly metalwork. All things considered, we got away cheap.”

“Thank you, Mr. Cooley,” Sam said.
We got away cheap.
The dead and the maimed would not agree with the exec. Sam found that he was inclined to. War measured what you dished out against what you took. By that grim arithmetic, the
Josephus Daniels
had got away cheap.

H
yrum Rush had gone back to Utah and been passed through the lines into Mormon-held territory under flag of truce. As far as Flora Blackford was concerned, even that was better than he deserved. His parting words before getting on the train that would take him west were, “You people will see what this costs you.” If he hadn’t been under safe-conduct, that would have been plenty to make Flora lock him up and throw away the key.

“The nerve of the man!” she spluttered when his warning—his threat?—got back to the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. “We should never have talked with him in the first place!”

“There I agree with you completely,” Robert Taft said. “You will have more luck persuading the administration than I’m likely to, though.”

Taft was a famously acerbic man, and also one given to understatement. He remained the leading hard-line Democrat in the Senate. Flora worried about agreeing with him. He no doubt also worried about agreeing with her.

“I’ve never said Socialists can’t make mistakes,” Flora answered. “I have said they aren’t the only ones who can make mistakes. Some people don’t recognize the difference.”

He gave her a tight smile—the only kind his face had room for. “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about,” he said, and she found herself smiling back.

They had plenty to do, questioning officers and men about the bloody fiasco at Fredericksburg. About the most anybody—including Daniel MacArthur—would say to defend it was,
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Trying to pin down why it had seemed a good idea was like trying to scoop up water with a sieve. The committee remained very busy and accomplished very little.

Like anyone else these days, Hyrum Rush had to go up through Canada to travel from east to west. Flora kept track of his progress through Franklin Roosevelt. “I hope you’re making him cool his heels up there,” she told the Assistant Secretary of War.

“We thought about it, Congresswoman,” he said. “We thought about it long and hard—believe you me we did. Finally, though, we decided that showing him how bad our bottleneck up there really is would only encourage him. And so we hustled him through instead.”

Flora thought about that. Reluctantly, she nodded. “You’re inconveniencing him most by inconveniencing him least,” she said.

Even over the telephone, his laugh made her want to laugh along with him. “That’s just what we’re doing, Flora,” he said between chortles. “The only thing is, I didn’t know it was what we were doing till you told me just now. I’m going to steal your line every chance I get, and most of the time I’m not going to give you any credit.”

“Who in politics ever does give anybody else any credit?” Flora said, which only set him laughing again.

She stopped worrying about Hyrum Rush once she heard he’d got back to what his people called Deseret. Sooner or later, the U.S. Army would grind it out of existence—for good this time, she hoped. Utah and the Mormons had been a running sore on the body politic for much too long.

The biggest question facing the Joint Committee was whether it would have the nerve to tell the War Department to put somebody besides Daniel MacArthur in charge in Virginia. Flora was convinced the man didn’t deserve his command. But she also saw he had an aura of invulnerability about him—not because of his battlefield talents but because of his personality.

George Custer had had an aura like that during the Great War. Even Teddy Roosevelt had moved carefully around him. Of course, Custer and Roosevelt—the other Roosevelt—had been rivals for years, ever since the Second Mexican War. But no one in the present administration had anything close to TR’s own strength of character. That being so, any decisive steps without prodding from the Joint Committee struck even Flora, a good Socialist, as unlikely.

She was saying so, pointedly enough to dismay Chairman Norris, when an explosion made the building shake. Plaster pattered down from the ceiling. Somebody said, “That was a close one.”

Somebody else said, “Damn Confederates haven’t sent any day bombers for a while—begging your pardon, Congresswoman.”

“Oh, I damn them, too,” Flora said. “You don’t need to doubt that for even a minute, believe me.” She looked down at her notes. “May I continue, Mr. Chairman?”

“You have the floor, Congresswoman.” Senator Norris looked as if he wished she didn’t.

“Thank you, sir.” The florid politeness that had once seemed so unnatural to her was now second nature. “As I was saying—”

But before she could say it, a man in a guard’s uniform stuck his head into the meeting room. “We’re evacuating the building. That was an auto bomb near the front entrance. We don’t know if they’ve got any more close by.” He grimaced. “We don’t even know who
they
are, dammit.” He didn’t apologize for swearing in front of Flora.

They.
The enemy within never went away. Who was it this time? Confederate saboteurs? Mormons living up to Hyrum Rush’s promise? Rebellious Canadians? British agents? Any combination of those groups working together? Flora didn’t know. Somebody was going to have to find out, though.

“Please come with me,” the guard said.

“Before we do, let’s see your identification,” Robert Taft snapped. Flora reluctantly allowed that that made good sense. If the man in the uniform was part of the plot . . . People were going to start looking under beds before they went to sleep if this went on.

The guard showed Senator Taft his identity card without a word of protest. Satisfied, Flora nodded. Flora wondered what Taft would have done if the man had gone for his pistol instead. Probably thrown himself at it—he had the courage of his convictions, as well as plenty of courage of the ordinary sort.

Following the guard, the members of the Joint Committee hurried out of the massive building Congress used in Philadelphia—wags called it the box the Capitol came in. They emerged on the side opposite the one where the auto bomb had gone off. Along with several others, Flora started around the building so she could see the damage for herself. “That isn’t safe!” the guard exclaimed.

“And how do you know standing here is?” she answered. “Any one of these motorcars may be full of TNT and ready to blow up.” The guard looked very unhappy, which didn’t mean she was wrong.

“You told him,” Taft said approvingly.

“So I did,” she said, and hurried on. A makeshift police and fire line stopped her and the others before they got very close to the site of the explosion. Even what they could see from there was bad enough. Bodies and pieces of bodies lay everywhere. The front of the hall had taken heavy damage. It all seemed worse than the aftermath of an air raid, perhaps because the auto’s chassis turned into more, and more lethal, shrapnel than a bomb casing did. One of Flora’s colleagues was noisily sick on his shoes.

“Someone will pay for this.” Robert Taft sounded grim.

No sooner had he spoken than half the façade of the Congressional hall crashed down to the cratered street. A great gray-brown cloud of dust rose. Soldiers and policemen rushed into it to rescue whoever lay buried under the rubble. Flora covered her face with her hands.

A reporter chose that moment to rush up to her and ask, “Congresswoman, what do you think of this explosion?”

“I hope not too many people got hurt. I hope the ones who did will recover.” Flora realized the man had a job to do, but she didn’t feel like answering foolish questions right now.

That didn’t stop the reporter from asking them. With an air of breathless anticipation, he said, “Who do you think is to blame for this atrocity?”

“I don’t know. I’m sure there will be an investigation,” Flora said.

“But if you had to guess, who would be responsible?” he persisted.

“If I had to guess right now,
I
would be irresponsible,” Flora told him.

The answer should have made him take a hint and go away. No such luck. He was not one of those reporters who recognized anything as subtle as a hint. And that turned out to be just as well, for his next question told Flora something she didn’t know: “What do you think of the explosions in Washington and New York and Boston and Pittsburgh and Chicago and—other places, too?”

“What explosions?” Flora and Robert Taft spoke together, in identical sharp tones.

“Whole bunch of auto bombs.” The reporter seemed as willing to give information as to try to pry it out of other people. “The Capitol and Wall Street and the State House in Boston and I don’t know what all else. Lots of damage, lots of people dead. All about the same time as this one. News was coming over the wire and by wireless when I got the call to get my, uh, fanny over here.”

“Jesus Christ!” Taft burst out. Flora didn’t echo him, but her thoughts amounted to something similar. He went on, “This has the smell of a conspiracy.” Flora wouldn’t have argued with that, either.

The reported scribbled in his spiral-bound notebook. “Smell of a conspiracy,” he repeated, and dipped his head. “Thank you, Senator—that’s a good line.” He hurried off.

“A good line,” Taft echoed bitterly. “That’s all he cared about. But my God—if what he said about those other places is true . . .”

“That would be very bad,” Flora said, one of the larger understatements of her own political career. “The Confederates have had a lot of trouble with auto bombs. I wonder if they’re paying us back, or if it’s someone else.”

As she had to the reporter, Taft said, “I don’t know.”

She nodded. But her conscience niggled at her all the same. She’d applauded when she heard about auto bombs going off in the Confederate States. The Confederates, after all, deserved it for the way they treated their Negroes.

Again, who thought the United States deserved it? The Confederates, because the USA had had the gall to win the Great War? The Mormons, because the United States wouldn’t leave their precious Deseret alone? She would have bet one them, but what did she have for proof? Nothing, and she knew it. The Canadians, because the United States still held their land? The British, because the Americans had taken Canada away from them?

All of the above? None of the above?

Sounding both furious and frightened, Robert Taft went on, “We’d better get a handle on this business in a hurry. If we don’t, any damn fool with an imaginary grievance will think he can load dynamite into a motorcar and get even with the world.”

Flora’s thoughts hadn’t gone in that direction, which didn’t mean the Senator from Ohio was wrong. She said, “We’d better get a handle on this for all kinds of reasons.” Two firemen carried a moaning, bloody woman past her on a stretcher. She pointed. “There’s one.”

“Yes.” Taft tipped his fedora to her. “We have our differences, you and I, but we both love this country.”

“That’s true. Not always in the same way, but we do,” Flora said. Cops helped a wounded man stagger by. Flora sighed. “At a time like this, though, what difference does party make?”

S
ergeant Michael Pound was not a happy man. His barrel—and, in fact, his whole unit of barrels—had finally escaped from the southern Ohio backwater where they’d been stuck for so long. They were facing the Confederates farther north. That should have done something to improve the gunner’s temper. It should have, but it hadn’t.

No, Pound remained unhappy, and made only the slightest efforts to hide it. He was a broad-shouldered, burly man: not especially tall, but made for slewing a gun from side to side if the hydraulics went out. He had a deceptively soft voice, and used it to say deceptively mild things. When he thought the men put above him were idiots, as he often did, he had a way of making sure they knew it.

What really irked him was that he’d been the gunner on Irving Morrell’s personal barrel. Whatever Morrell found out, Pound had learned shortly thereafter. Morrell hadn’t minded his sarcastic comments on the way the brass thought (if the brass thought at all: always an interesting question). And Michael Pound hadn’t thought Morrell was an idiot. Oh, no—on the contrary. The only thing wrong with Morrell was that
his
superiors hadn’t seen how good he was.

The Confederates had. After their sniper put a bullet in Morrell, Pound was the one who’d carried him out of harm’s way and back to the aid tent. Scuttlebutt said Morrell was finally back in action. That was good. The CSA would be sorry.

But Morrell wasn’t back in action
here.
That wasn’t good, and it especially wasn’t good for Michael Pound. He’d declined a commission several times. Now he was paying for it. Because of his reputation as a mouthy troublemaker, he didn’t even command his own barrel, though a lot of sergeants did. They’d put him under a young lieutenant instead. Pound didn’t know if they’d deliberately intended to humiliate him, but they’d sure done the job.