Drive to the East (44 page)

When he was satisfied, he got on the telephone. He called officer after officer, delivered his orders, and hung up. Maybe this would work and maybe it wouldn’t. It seemed worth a try, though.

One thing: U.S. reconnaissance was good. Most people who lived in Ohio, especially in this northern part of it, wanted nothing to do with the Confederates. They slipped through enemy lines, risking their necks to report on what Jake Featherston’s men were up to. When Morrell heard the Confederates were assembling armor in Homeworth, a few miles west of Salem, he smiled to himself.

Their attack on Salem went in two days later. They came loaded for bear, convinced they had a big force of barrels in front of them. Morrell showed a few and shelled the Confederates heavily to slow them down. That only made them push harder. They’d just about reached Salem’s outskirts . . . when the real U.S. barrel force, which had concentrated some miles to the north, roared down and struck them in the flank.

The Confederates still might have made a fight of it. They had at least as many machines as the USA did, and theirs hit harder. But they were rattled, as anybody hit from a direction he didn’t expect would have been. They fell back in some disorder, and left a lot of barrels burning in front of Salem.

“That was amazing, sir!” Now the young lieutenant looked at Morrell with something not far from hero worship.

“That’s what we’re supposed to do, dammit,” Morrell said, wondering how—and if—he could bring off the same sort of thing again.

A
bner Dowling was the man who’d spotted the Confederates thinning their lines in Virginia so they could send more men into Ohio. He hadn’t had the chance to attack them after he caught them doing that. Oh, no. His reward was thinning his own lines so the USA could try to smash through the Confederates’ position at Fredericksburg, which hadn’t worked at all. Now he was thinning them still further to send reinforcements to the West.

He took a half pint of whiskey out of his desk drawer and stared at it. Like most half pints, it was curved to fit the hand. He wasn’t a man who drank to excess. He remembered General Custer. With whiskey as with women, Custer could resist everything except temptation. And Custer with a snootful was even more a bull in a china shop than he had been any other time.

No, Dowling wasn’t like that—which didn’t mean he was teetotal, either. Every once in a while, a nip was welcome. Sometimes you needed
not
to think about things for a little while, and whiskey was the best thought preventer this side of a blackjack. He undid the metal screw top, raised the bottle to his lips, and took a healthy slug.

His adjutant chose that moment to walk in the door.

Captain Angelo Toricelli had been with him since his unhappy stay as commandant in Salt Lake City—another one of the garden spots of the universe. Unlike some adjutants, Toricelli understood that he wasn’t about to end up on Skid Row just because he drank now and again. It was embarrassing all the same.

Trying to cover that embarrassment, Dowling held out the bottle and asked, “Want some for yourself?”

“No, thank you, sir,” Captain Toricelli answered—not primly, but not in a way that suggested he’d change his mind, either. “We have a message from General MacArthur inquiring how the pullback is going in this corps.”

“Tell General MacArthur to—” Dowling broke off. If he went on in that vein, Toricelli would think it was the whiskey talking. That was nonsense. Dowling needed no booze to despise Daniel MacArthur. Still . . . “Tell General MacArthur to rest assured that we are complying with his orders and the War Department’s.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. That’s well phrased.” Toricelli’s dark eyes glinted. He knew what Dowling had been on the point of saying. But Dowling hadn’t said it. Neither he nor the half pint could get the blame. Toricelli saluted and left the room.

Dowling eyed the little bottle. It was almost as if the narrow escape gave him the license for another drink. He shook his head and put the bottle back in the desk drawer. It would be there when he really needed it. If he drank when he didn’t really need it . . . That was how trouble started.

Off in the distance, somebody’s artillery opened up. He thought those were U.S. guns. With fewer foot soldiers on the ground, artillery had to take up some of the slack. Of course, some of his artillery was getting pulled west to try to stop the Confederates, too.

After fifteen or twenty minutes, the guns fell silent. Dowling hoped that meant they’d smashed whatever they were aiming at. If not, some wireless man would rush in with news of a new disaster. And Dowling would have to try to put the pieces back together—and take the blame if Humpty Dumpty remained bits of eggshell.

His eyes went to the large-scale map of Virginia on the wall. He didn’t like the way his right flank was vulnerable. He never had. General Patton, the Confederates’ answer to Irving Morrell, had roared out of the mountains trying to roll him up. Patton hadn’t managed it. Dowling took a certain amount of pride in the way he’d defended against the CSA’s armored wizard, but they didn’t pin medals on your chest for losing only a few square miles. Often that deserved a medal, but it never got one.

If Patton or some other Confederate hotshot tried charging out of the mountains again, could Dowling’s corps hold the enemy again? He muttered unhappily. If the Confederates hit him as hard as they had the last time, he probably couldn’t. But he brightened a little a moment later. He might not have the wherewithal to defend that he’d had before, but he was pretty damn sure the boys in butternut couldn’t mount the same kind of attack as they had then. They seemed to be putting everything they had into the push through Ohio and into Pennsylvania.

He looked at the map again, then slowly nodded to himself. Ever since the war started, people had been saying that whoever could mount two big drives at once would likely win. So far, neither side had come close. Logic said the United States had the better chance. They had more men and more resources. They also had more problems. The Confederates had a smoldering Negro uprising to worry about; their response seemed to be massacre. The United States had to flabble about the Mormons, and now the Canadians, the Japanese in the Pacific, and the really mad naval struggle in the North Atlantic. With all the sideshows, they couldn’t concentrate on the main event.

Captain Toricelli came in again. “Yes? What is it?” Dowling asked with a sinking feeling. His adjutant could bear bad tidings at least as well as a wireless operator.

But Toricelli only asked, “Sir, do you know a Miss Ophelia Clemens?”

“The reporter? I should say I do,” Dowling answered. “I spoke with her outside General MacArthur’s headquarters not more than a few weeks ago, as a matter of fact. Why?”

“Because she just pulled up in front of this building, sir,” Toricelli said. “I doubt like the dickens she’s here to talk to me.”

“Send her in. Send her in,” Dowling said. “How subversive do you think I can be?”

“I couldn’t begin to guess.” By Toricelli’s expression, though, he feared for the worst.

When Ophelia Clemens marched into Dowling’s office, she looked him in the eye and said, “General, I’d murder somebody for a drink.”

“Not me, I hope.” Dowling opened his desk drawer and, with the air of a vaudeville conjuror, produced the half pint. “Here you are, ma’am. At your service.”

“God bless you,” Ophelia Clemens said. “I hoped I could find a St. Bernard in all these Alps.” After that rhetorical outburst, she unscrewed the cap and swigged like a man. She eyed the bottle in her hand with a certain amount of respect. “That’s what they call panther piss, isn’t it?”

“Something like that,” Dowling allowed. “It sure isn’t sipping whiskey.”

She handed the half pint back to him. When he put it away without drinking, she said, “Keep it around just for poisoning visitors, do you?”

“By no means, ma’am. You misunderstand me. I’m about half an hour ahead of you, that’s all. And what besides bartender duty can I do for you on this none too lovely day?”

“Well, I’ve got my own cigarettes,” she replied, and lit one to prove it. “I don’t suppose you could spare me some truth?”

Dowling snorted. “You don’t ask for much, do you?”

“If you had it, I think you might give it to me,” Ophelia Clemens told him. “That’s more than I can say about most of the people in your line of work I know.”

“You flatter me,” he said. “Keep it up. I love it.”

“I’ll give you the reporter’s ultimate flattery, then,” she said. “How would you like to be ‘a reliable source’?”

Dowling knew what that meant: somebody who shot off his mouth without getting called to account for it. At his age and station, such a chance tempted him more than a twenty-two-year-old virgin—more than a twenty-two-year-old professional, come to that. “Go ahead and ask,” he said, “and we’ll see how reliable I am.”

“All right.” Ophelia Clemens took out a spiral-bound notebook, opened it to a blank page, and poised a pencil above it. “How bad do things look in Ohio and Pennsylvania?”

“You just named Pennsylvania. Right there, that says we aren’t doing as well as we ought to be.” Dowling shook his head. “No, I take it back. That’s not fair. I don’t know what things are like on the ground over there. I have my own troubles, Lord knows. You can say things aren’t going as well as we wish they were.”

Her pencil scratched across the page. “Do you think Featherston’s going after Pittsburgh?”

“Too early to be sure, but that’s how it looks right now,” Dowling said.

“Uh-
huh.
” Ophelia Clemens wrote some more. “Do you know, they wouldn’t give me a straight answer in the War Department? You never heard so many variations on ‘No comment’ in all your born days. Franz Liszt couldn’t write variations like that.”

“Heh,” Dowling said doubtfully as the allusion flew over his head. Had he been up in the War Department, he would have played it cagey, too—he knew that. You could get in trouble for saying yes and being right, for saying yes and being wrong, and conversely with no as well.
No comment
looked pretty good under those circumstances.

“Can the Confederates take Pittsburgh?” Ophelia Clemens asked.

When Dowling got questions like that, being a “reliable source” looked a lot less enjoyable. “I hope not,” he blurted.

Scritch, scritch, scritch
went the pencil point. “Can we stay in the war if they do take Pittsburgh?”

No, this wasn’t any fun at all. “I hope so,” Dowling answered. “Losing it would hurt us. We make an awful lot of steel there. But it’s not like Birmingham—it’s not just about the only place where we make steel. As far as that goes, we can hold on and hold out. Even so . . .”

“Will the country stand for it?” she asked. “Cleveland was supposed to hold up the Confederates for a long time. It didn’t, not for nearly long enough. It’s gone. It’s lost. If Pittsburgh goes the same way, won’t we just say, ‘Oh, no, we can’t win this one,’ and throw in the towel?”

“That’s what Jake Featherston hopes we’ll do, anyhow,” Dowling said. “We’ve got elections coming up this fall. Now, I’m just a soldier. I’m not supposed to know anything about politics, and I mostly don’t.” Soldiers, even soldiers acting as reliable sources, had to say such things. Dowling—and, no doubt, Ophelia Clemens with him—knew he was being disingenuous, but he couldn’t help it. He went on, “One thing I haven’t seen is anybody from any party campaigning on a ‘Peace Now!’ platform.”

Scritch, scritch, scritch.
“Well, neither have I,” the reporter said. “Why do you suppose that is?”

“Because everybody figures Featherston would kick us while we’re down,” Dowling answered at once. “Don’t you? What else could it be? He’s made it pretty damn clear that he tells lies whenever he opens his mouth. Or do you think I’m wrong?”

“Me?” She shook her head. “No, sir. Not even a little bit. You know the number of the beast, all right. I’ve been in this business for as long as you’ve been in the Army—longer, really, because I watched my father before I was old enough or good enough to do it myself. Jake Featherston scares the spit out of me. I’ve never seen anybody like him, not on this continent. Some of the people in
Action Française,
maybe, and that Mosley fellow in England, but nobody here comes close.”

“We should have smashed him when we had the chance, just after he got power,” Dowling said. But Featherston didn’t look so dangerous then. And the USA was stuck in the economic collapse. And so . . .
Yes,
Dowling thought sourly.
And so . . .

H
ipolito Rodriguez sat on his cot in the guards’ barracks at Camp Determination, methodically cleaning his submachine gun. He’d learned in the dirt and mud and dust of the trenches that a clean weapon could make the difference between life and death. The submachine gun had a more complicated apparatus than his old Tredegar, too.

Another guard, an Alabaman named Jonah Gurney, said, “Anybody’d reckon you was married to that gun.” He carried his weapon when he walked through the camp and ignored it the rest of the time. He was a younger man, not a recruit from the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades. He’d never seen combat, and it showed.

“Married? No.” Rodriguez shook his head. “My wife screw me, I like that. This gun screw me, I don’t like nothin’ no more.” He pushed an oily rag through the barrel with a cleaning rod.

The rest of the men in the barracks laughed. “He got you, Jonah,” somebody said. “He got you good.”

By the dull flush rising on Gurney’s blunt features, he already knew that. He liked ragging on other people. Oh, sure—he liked that fine. It wasn’t so much fun when somebody turned the tables on him. If Rodriguez had had a dime for everybody like that he’d met, he would have been one of the richest men in Sonora, certainly too rich to be a camp guard.

Scowling, Gurney said, “You’re asshole buddies with the big cheese in the camp, ain’t you?”

“We were in the war together,” Rodriguez answered with a shrug. Because he’d practiced stripping and assembling the submachine gun so much, he could let his hands do it while he kept an eye on the other guard. “I dunno about asshole buddies. I don’t think I like the sound of that too much.” He did like the sound with which a full magazine went into place: a satisfying click.