Drive to the East (35 page)

McDougald ground out the cigarette under his heel and lit another one. “Days like this, I wonder why I stayed in the Army,” he said.

“I wonder why I came back,” O’Doull agreed.

“Oh, no, Doc. Oh, no. You did more for that guy than I ever could have. You’re good. I’m not bad—I know I’m not bad—but you’re
good.
”

“Thanks, Granny. I’m not good enough, not for that. Nobody’s good enough for that.” O’Doull muttered something under his breath. Even he wasn’t sure if it was curse or prayer. He went on, “Is there any point to all this?”

“For us? Sure,” Granville McDougald answered. “If not for us, a lot of guys would be a lot worse off than they are. What we do is worth doing. For the whole thing? I’m not the one to ask about that, sir. If you want to cross the lines and talk to Jake Featherston . . .”

“If I ever ran into Jake Featherston, I’d smash his head in with a rock, and screw the Hippocratic oath,” O’Doull said. McDougald laughed, for all the world as if he’d been kidding. He hadn’t, not even a little bit. In plaintive tones, he added, “Featherston went through the last war, every goddamn bit of it. Wasn’t that enough for him?”

“When you lose, a war is never enough,” McDougald answered. That probably held an unfortunate amount of truth. “You happen to recall what Remembrance Day was like before the Great War?”

O’Doull grunted, because he did. The United States, twice beaten and humiliated by the Confederates and Britain and France, had had a lot to remember. The regimentation, the constant stinting to build up the Army and Navy, the tub-thumping speeches, the parades with the flag flown upside down as a symbol of distress . . . He sighed. “So we finally won. So what did it get us?” He waved. “This.”

“What would we have got if we lost?” McDougald asked. “Something better? Something worse? Christ, we might have grown our own Featherston.”

“Tabernac!”
O’Doull said, startled into the Quebecois French he’d used for so long. “That’s a really scary thought, Granny.”

The medic only shrugged. “When things go good, everybody laughs at people like that and says they belong in the loony bin. But when times get hard, they come out of the woodwork and people start paying attention. You go, ‘Well, how could they make things any worse? Let’s see what they can do.’ ”

“Yeah. And then they go and do it,” O’Doull said. Featherston wasn’t the only one of that breed running around loose these days, either.
Action Française
and King Charles had mobilized France even sooner than the Freedom Party grabbed the reins in the CSA. And in England, Churchill and Mosley were yet another verse of the same sorry song.

“It’s a bastard,” McDougald said. “Except for bashing in Featherston’s brains, to hell with me if I know what to do about it. And it might even be too late for that to do any good. By now, this mess has a life of its own.”

“Some life.” The aid station was close enough to the front to share in the smell of the battlefield. O’Doull knew what death smelled like. He lived with that odor—not always heavy, but always there. When war was alive, that smell always got loose.

“Doc! Hey, Doc!” Stretcher bearers hauled another wounded man toward the tent with the big Red Crosses on the sides. Leonard O’Doull and Granville McDougald looked at each other. Maybe they could save this one. Maybe he wouldn’t be horribly mangled. Maybe . . . They’d find out in a minute. Shaking their heads, they ducked back into the tent.

A
ppointments, appointments, appointments. Jake Featherston had started to hate them. They chewed up his time and spat it out. When he was talking with people, he couldn’t do the things that really needed doing. He even resented Ferdinand Koenig, and if Ferd wasn’t a friend he didn’t have any.

Today, a smile lightened the Attorney General’s heavy features. “That Pinkard fellow’s given us a new line on things,” he said. “We may be able to dispose of more niggers faster than we ever dreamed we could.”

“Oh, yeah?” Sure as hell, that piqued Jake’s interest. “Tell me about it.” Koenig did. The more Jake listened, the more intrigued he got. “Will this shit work?” he asked. “Do we make it in bulk now, or would we have to run up a new factory to get as much as we need?”

“That’s the beauty of it,” Koenig answered. “They already use the stuff to fumigate houses and such. There’s a company in Little Rock—Cyclone Chemicals, the name of the place is—that makes it by the ton. They aren’t the only one, either. They’re just the biggest.”

“Well, I will be a son of a bitch. Pinkard’s chock full of good ideas, isn’t he?” Jake said. “Promote him a grade and tell him to see what he can do to try this out as fast as he can. We’ve got a big job ahead of us, and we’re going to need all the help we can get.”

“I’ll do it.” The Attorney General wrote in a notebook he pulled from a breast pocket. Half apologetically, he said, “I’ve got so much going on, I lose things if I don’t write ’em down. Forget my own head if it wasn’t nailed on tight.”

Jake laughed. “I know what you mean. Boy, don’t I just? But stay on that one, Ferd. Taking care of the niggers is just as important as licking the Yankees. Anything else I ought to know about?”

“Reports I get from here and there, grumbling about the war is up a little.”

“We’ll deal with it.” Jake muttered to himself. Things were dragging on longer than he’d told the country they would. That made propaganda harder than it should have been. “New offensive’s going well,” he said, looking on the bright side. “I’ll talk with Saul, too, see if we can’t figure out a way to perk up morale. Anything besides that?”

“Don’t think so.” Big and ponderous, Koenig rose to his feet. “I’ll get on the telephone to Pinkard right away.”

“Yeah, you do that.” Featherston got up, too, and walked to the door with him. As Koenig left, Jake asked, “Who’s next on the list, Lulu?”

“A Professor FitzBelmont, Mr. President,” his secretary answered. Working underground fazed her not at all. Jake suspected working underwater wouldn’t have fazed her, either.

“FitzBelmont . . .” The name was vaguely familiar. And then, with a good politician’s near-total recall for people, Jake remembered exactly who Professor Henderson V. FitzBelmont was. He groaned. “Oh, for God’s sake! The uranium nut. How did
he
get another appointment?”

“Do you want me to tell him it’s been canceled, sir?” Lulu asked.

“No, no,” Jake said resignedly. “If he’s out there cooling his heels in the waiting room, he’ll raise a stink if you send him home now. Fetch him in. I’ll get rid of him as quick as I can.”

Professor FitzBelmont was as rumpled and tweedy as he had been the year before. “Good to see you, Mr. President,” he said.

“Likewise,” Jake lied. “What’s on your mind today, Professor? Kindly cut to the chase—I’ve got a lot to do.”

“You will remember, sir, that I told you that uranium—uranium-235, that is—has the potential to make an explosive thousands of times as strong as dynamite.”

“I do recollect, yeah. But I also recollect it’d cost an arm and a leg, and you weren’t sure how long it’d take or whether you could do it at all. Has anything changed since then? Better be something, Professor, or I won’t be real happy with you. I haven’t got time to waste.”

Henderson V. FitzBelmont licked his lips and nervously fiddled with his gold-framed spectacles. “In terms of what we know about uranium itself, not much
has
changed.” Jake started to growl angrily, but FitzBelmont plowed ahead anyway: “But I do know, or I can make a good guess, that the United States are probably looking at this same question.”

“How do you know that?” Featherston rapped out. Professor FitzBelmont had found a way to make him pay attention, all right.

“For one thing, their journals have suddenly stopped mentioning uranium at all. For another, there are large engineering works in the northwestern USA that appear consistent with an effort along these lines.”

“And how do you know
that
?”

“I was asked by C.S. Intelligence to identify buildings in photos,” the professor replied. “No doubt because of my previous visit to you, those officers knew of my interest in that field. And if I were to build a plant for producing enriched uranium, it would look something like what the United States are building in Washington.”

“All right.” Featherston surprised himself by how mildly he spoke. Every once in a while, somebody who looked and sounded like a nut turned out not to be one after all. This felt like one of those times. “If the damnyankees are interested in this uranium stuff, too, there must be something to it. That’s what you’re telling me, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know, sir, not for sure. I don’t know whether we can isolate U-235, how long doing it would take, or how much it would cost. There also seems to be a possibility that U-238 can be transmuted—”

“Can be what?” Jake wished the prof would stop talking like a prof.

“Changed,” FitzBelmont said patiently. “Maybe it can be changed into another element that will also explode. Theory seems to suggest the possibility. I know less about this than I do about U-235. There is much more U-238, so the second possibility would be advantageous to us. But I am certain of one thing.”

“Oh? And what’s that?” Jake asked, as the physics professor surely wanted him to do. Usually, he manipulated. Not today; not right now.

Henderson V. FitzBelmont moved in for the kill, an intellectual tiger on the prowl: “If the enemy succeeds in acquiring this weapon and we do not, I fail to see how our cause can avoid disaster.”

Jake thought about it. Twenty thousand times as strong as TNT? One bomb and no more city? The USA with eight or ten of those bombs and the CSA with none? A fleet of Yankee bombers had done horrible things to Fort Worth and Dallas, catching the Texas towns by surprise. That wouldn’t happen again. The officer who’d been asleep at the switch now made his reports in hell; those bombers had made him pay for his mistake. But if the USA didn’t need a fleet of bombers, if one airplane would do the job . . . Nobody could stop every single goddamn airplane.

“Figure out what you need, Professor,” Jake said heavily. “Money, machinery, people—whatever it is, you’ll get it. I want the list as fast as you can shoot it to me. No more than two weeks, you hear?”

“Uh, yes, sir.” FitzBelmont sounded more than a little dazed. He lost a point in Jake’s book on account of that. If he’d really believed in this, he would have pulled that list out of his briefcase now. Maybe he hadn’t believed he could persuade the President of the CSA. Featherston hoped that was it.

He accompanied FitzBelmont out of his subterranean sanctum, as he had Ferd Koenig a little while before. After the physics professor left, Jake turned to Lulu and said, “Get on the horn to General Potter. Tell him I want to see him here ten minutes ago.”

“Yes, Mr. President.” She didn’t bat an eye. She never did. “Can I tell him what this is in reference to?”

“Nope. I’ll take care of that when he gets here.”

“Yes, Mr. President.” Lulu knew what was always the right answer.

Featherston endured a delegation of Freedom Party officials from Alabama and Mississippi going on about how they needed more men and more guns to help keep their smoldering Negro rebellions from bursting into flames. Since Jake couldn’t possibly give them more men, he promised them more guns, and hoped he wasn’t crossing his fingers on the promise. They seemed satisfied as they went away. Whether he could keep them satisfied . . .
I’ll do my goddamnedest, that’s all.

Clarence Potter came in next. Somebody in the waiting room down the hall was bound to be madder than hell.
Too bad,
the President thought. Without preamble, he barked, “What do you know about Henderson V. FitzBelmont and uranium?”
Sweet Jesus Christ,
he thought.
Till FitzBelmont came here last year, I’d never even heard of the shit. I wish I still hadn’t.

“Ah,” Potter said. “Has he convinced you?”

“He sure as hell has,” Jake answered. “How about you?”

“I’m no scientist,” Potter warned. Jake made an impatient noise. Potter made an apologetic gesture. “Yes, sir, he’s convinced me, too. Sooner or later, somebody’s going to be able to make a hell of a bang with that stuff. If it’s sooner, and if it’s the damnyankees, we’ve got us some big worries.”

“That’s how it looks to me, too,” Featherston said unhappily. He pointed at Potter. “How the hell did you find out about that place in Washington? That’s as far from here as it can be.”

“It’s in the U.S. budget—a lot of money, and no details at all about what the Yankees are spending it on,” the Intelligence officer replied. “Spotting the combination sent up a red flag.”

“Good,” Jake said. “Nice to know somebody in your outfit wouldn’t blow his brains out if he farted, by God. Now the next question is, how did you get the pictures of that place for FitzBelmont to look at? I didn’t think our spy airplanes could fly that far, and I reckon the USA’d shoot ’em down most of the time even if they could.”

“Yes, Mr. President, I agree with you—that’s what would have happened if we’d taken off from Texas or Sonora,” Potter said. “And we would have given away our interest in the area, too. So we didn’t do that. Our man in western Washington rented a crop duster at a local airstrip. Nobody paid any attention to him, and he got his photos.”

Jake Featherston guffawed. “Good. That’s goddamn good. But we won’t be able to do it again anytime soon, though.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Potter said, nodding.

“We found out what we need to know, so we don’t have to worry about putting the damnyankees’ backs up by trying it again,” Jake said, and Clarence Potter nodded once more. The President aimed his finger like a rifle. “We’ve got to keep the USA from finding out that we know what they’re up to, and from finding out we’re up to the very same thing ourselves. Whatever your super-duper top-secret security business is, use everything you’ve got and then some on whatever has anything to do with uranium.”

“I’ve already given those orders, sir,” Potter said. “Minimum possible in writing, and code phrases all through instead of the name of the metal. No telephone discussion at all—never can tell who might be listening. You did that just right when you had your secretary call me.”