Drive to the East (66 page)

“Twenty-seven.” Rodriguez turned to the guards with him. “Remember that.”

“Will do, Troop Leader,” the three of them said as if they were one man. Rodriguez had discovered he liked wearing three stripes on his sleeve. He gave more orders than he took these days. In orders as in many other things, it was better to give than to receive.

He turned back to the Negro. “I find you lie to me about where you at,
mallate,
this camp ain’t big enough for you to hide. You understand?”

“I ain’t lyin’, Mistuh Guard, suh.” The prisoner practically radiated innocence—and no doubt would keep doing it till Rodriguez looked away or turned his back. “If I’s lyin’, I’s flyin’.”

“If you lyin’, you dyin’.” Rodriguez capped the black man’s rhyme with one of his own. He gestured with the muzzle of the submachine gun once more, this time in dismissal. The prisoner scurried away, glad to be out of the dread eye of officialdom.

“Troop Leader, how come we got to remember that barracks number?” asked one of the guards.

Rodriguez swallowed a sigh. Some of these people had no business looking down their noses at Negroes for stupidity. Patiently, he answered, “Because, Pruitt, we got to do something about Barracks Twenty-seven.”

“Like what, Troop Leader?” Pruitt radiated innocence, too. The trouble was, his was real.

“Ain’t gonna talk about it here.” Rodriguez gestured once more, this time with his left hand. There were four of them in their gray uniforms. All around them were Negroes, thousands of Negroes. Even though the men in gray all carried submachine guns, Rodriguez found himself sweating despite the cooler weather. The Negroes could rush them. Other guards would come try to save them. The machine gunners in the guard towers outside the barbed-wire perimeter would fire till their gun barrels glowed cherry red. They would massacre the blacks. Rodriguez doubted that would do him much good.

But no attack came. He and his companions finished their patrol. When they got back to the guards’ quarters, he reported to an officer what the Negro had told him. “Hmm,” said the chief assault leader—the equivalent of a captain in the Freedom Party guards. “What do you reckon we ought to do?”

“Clean out Barracks Twenty-seven, sir,” Rodriguez answered at once. “Tell them we ship them somewhere else because they talk too much. Then put them in trucks or send them to the bathhouse.”

“Hmm,” the chief assault leader said again. “I can’t decide that. I’ll have to pass it on up the line.”

“Yes, sir,” Rodriguez said resignedly. He’d seen this sort of thing in the Great War. Some officers knew what needed doing, then went and did it. Others knew what needed doing, then waited till somebody over them told them to do it. They weren’t so useful as the first kind, but they weren’t hopeless. The ones who didn’t know what needed doing . . . those were the officers who got their men killed.

Barracks Twenty-seven got cleaned out four days later than it should have, but it did get cleaned out. Rodriguez was part of the crew that took care of it. He wasn’t sorry; he wanted to see the job done. He also wanted to see it done right. “Gotta make sure we don’t spook the spooks,” another guard said. That summed things up, though Rodriguez’s smile was more dutiful than amused: he’d heard that joke, or ones too much like it, too many times before.

A different chief assault leader was in charge of the cleanout. Rodriguez wouldn’t have entrusted it to the man with whom he’d spoken, either. This fellow—his name was Higbe—handled it with aplomb. “We are too goddamn crowded here,” he told the black men lined up in front of the barracks, “so we’re shippin’ your asses down to El Paso. Y’all go back in the barracks and get whatever you need. Much as you can keep on your lap in a truck.” He looked at his watch. “You got ten minutes. Get movin’!”

That was a nice touch. Nothing too bad could happen to a man if he could bring his handful of miserable possessions with him . . . could it? One Negro hung back. Rodriguez recognized the black who’d spoken to him before at the same time as the
mallate
recognized him. Instead of hurrying into the barracks, the black man came over to him and said, “Mistuh Guard, suh, I don’t want to go to no El Paso.”

He knows what’s coming, all right,
Rodriguez thought. “I think we fix it so you don’t got to,” he said aloud. He didn’t want the Negro kicking up a fuss. The less fuss, the better for everybody—except the prisoners, and they didn’t count. He went on, “Let me talk to my officer. We take care of it. You stay here. Don’t go nowhere.”

“Lawd bless you, suh,” the Negro said.

Rodriguez spoke briefly with Chief Assault Leader Higbe. Unlike the other officer, Higbe didn’t hesitate. He just nodded. “That sounds good to me, Troop Leader. You take care of it like you said.”

“Yes, sir.” Rodriguez saluted and went back to the Negro, who was nervously shifting from foot to foot. He nodded to the black man. “You come with me.”

“Where you takin’ me, suh?”

“Guards’ quarters. Got some questions to ask you.”

“Oh, yes, suh.” The Negro almost capered with glee. “I sings like a canary, long as you don’t put me on no truck.”

“You don’t want to go, you don’t go,” Rodriguez said. “What’s your name?”

“I’s Demetrius, suh,” the Negro answered.

Another fancy name,
Rodriguez thought scornfully. The more raggedy the
mallate,
the fancier the handle he seemed to come with. “
Bueno,
Demetrius.” His words gave no clue to what lay in his mind. “You come along.”

Demetrius came, all smiles and relief. None of the other prisoners took any special notice; guards pulled blacks out of camp for one reason or another all the time. “What you need to know, suh?” Demetrius asked as they got near the barbed wire that segregated prisoners and guards. “Don’t matter what, not hardly. I tell you.”

“Bueno,”
Rodriguez said once more. He waved to the gate crew. They opened up for him and Demetrius. Rodriguez urged the Negro on ahead of him. As soon as buildings hid them from the prisoners’ view, he fired a shot into the back of Demetrius’ head. He waited to see if he would need give him another one to finish him off, but he didn’t. The black man probably died before he finished crumpling to the ground.

“What’s up, Troop Leader?” another guard asked, as casually as if they were talking about the weather.

“Troublemaker,” Rodriguez answered: a response that could bury any black man. “We got to get rid of the body quiet-like.”

“Niggers’ll know he came in here. They’ll know he didn’t come out,” the trooper said.

Rodriguez shrugged. “And so? We say we catch him dealing in contraband, they think he deserve what he get.”

That overstated things a little. The prisoners admired people who could smuggle forbidden things into Camp Determination. But they knew the guards came down hard on the smugglers they caught. Dealers in contraband usually bribed guards to get stuff for them and look the other way. Guards got fired for doing things like that. The Negroes got fired, too: fired on.

“Get the body out of here,” Rodriguez told the man who’d questioned him.

He had stripes on his sleeve. The other guard didn’t. “Yes, Troop Leader,” he said, and took the late, unlamented Demetrius by the feet.

“I want to congratulate Troop Leader Rodriguez for a fine piece of work,” Jefferson Pinkard said at a guards’ meeting a few days later. “He spotted trouble, he reported it, and we dealt with it. Nobody in Barracks Twenty-seven is going to spread rumors anymore, by God. Chief Assault Leader Higbe deserves commendation for making the cleanout run so smooth. A letter will go in his file.”

He didn’t talk about a letter going into Rodriguez’s file, even if they were friends. Rodriguez might get rockers under his stripes, but that was it. All the commendation letters in the world wouldn’t make him anything more than a top kick. The Confederate States were more likely to name a Sonoran peasant an officer than they were to appoint a Negro Secretary of State, but only a little. Rodriguez didn’t worry about it. He knew he’d done a good job, too. He’d saved everybody in camp—except the Negroes—some trouble. That was plenty.

M
ajor General Abner Dowling could see the Confederate States of America from his new headquarters in Clovis, New Mexico. His only major trouble was, at the moment he couldn’t see much of the Eleventh Army, with which he was supposed to go after the enemy. He had a lot of territory to cover and not a lot of men with which to cover it. The war out here by Texas’ western border seemed very much an afterthought.

Back in the lost and distant days of peace, Clovis was a minor trade center on the U.S.–C.S. frontier. The town was founded in the early years of the century with the unromantic handle of Riley’s Switch; a railroad official’s daughter suggested renaming it for the first Christian King of France. Cattle from the West Texas prairie paused at its feed lots before going on to supply the meat markets of California. It had flourished when western Texas, under the name of Houston, joined the USA: those same cattle kept coming west, only now without a customs barrier. Houston’s return to Texas and to the CSA sent Clovis into a tailspin from which it had yet to recover.

Men in green-gray weren’t cattle, even if they were often treated in ways that would have made a rancher blush or turn pale. Feeding them and separating them from the little money the U.S. government doled out to them had produced a small upturn, but the Clovis Chamber of Commerce still sighed for the days when the longhorn ruled the local economy.

The Chamber of Commerce’s sighs were not Dowling’s worry, except when the local greasy spoons all jacked up their prices to gouge soldiers at the same time. He growled then. When growling didn’t work, he threatened to move his headquarters and place Clovis permanently off-limits to all military personnel. A threat to the pocketbook got people’s attention. Prices promptly came back down.

Up till now, that was the biggest victory Dowling had won. Both his side and his Confederate counterparts patrolled the border on horseback. Even command cars were hard to come by in these parts, and some of the terrain was too rugged for anything with wheels. Every so often, cavalrymen in green-gray and those in butternut would shoot at one another. Their occasional casualties convinced both sides they were being aggressive enough.

Dowling was plowing through paperwork and patting himself on the back for getting out from under Daniel MacArthur when his adjutant stuck his head into the office. “Sir, there’s an officer from the War Department here to see you,” Major Angelo Toricelli said.

“There is?” Dowling blinked. “Why, in God’s name?”

“Beats me, sir. He didn’t say,” Toricelli answered cheerfully. “All he said was that his name is Major Levitt and he’s got something he’s supposed to hand-deliver to you.” Toricelli paused. “I had him searched. Whatever it is, it’s not a people bomb.”

“Thank you, Major,” Dowling said. “Maybe you’d better show him in.”

Major Levitt was skinny, sandy-haired, and not particularly memorable. After Toricelli ducked out of the office, he said, “Your adjutant is, ah, a diligent young man.”

“Well, yes,” Dowling said. In a low-key way, Levitt had style. Dowling knew his features would have been much more ruffled if he’d just been frisked. “What can I do for you today, Major?”

“I have this for you, sir.” Levitt set a sealed envelope on Dowling’s desk. “Major Toricelli didn’t find anything obviously lethal about it.”

“I’m so relieved,” Dowling murmured, not about to let the officer from Philadelphia show more sangfroid than he did himself. Levitt smiled. When he did, his whole face lit up. He looked like a human being, and a nice one, instead of a cog in the military machine. Dowling opened the envelope, unfolded the papers inside, and began to read. He suddenly looked up. “Jesus Christ!” he said, and then, “You know what’s in these orders?”

“Yes, sir,” Levitt said. “You’re allowed to discuss them with me.”

“Oh, joy.” Dowling went on reading. When he finished, he looked up again. “I understand what I’m supposed to do. But why on earth am I supposed to concentrate my forces and launch an attack? There’s nothing in West Texas worth having.”

“I know.” Major Levitt smiled another of his charming smiles. “I served there for a while between the wars, when it was Houston.”

“These”—Dowling tapped the orders with the nail of his index finger—“are very strange. When I was sent here, they told me that as long as the Confederates didn’t steal Albuquerque and Santa Fe while we weren’t looking, I’d be doing my job. And now this. What’s going on?”

Levitt told him exactly what was going on, in about half a dozen sentences. “Any questions, sir?” he finished.

“No,” Dowling said. “You’re absolutely right. I can see the need. Just the same, though, Major, and no offense to you, I’m going to keep you here for a while, till Philadelphia confirms that it really did send these orders. They look authentic—but then, they would if they were phony, too. Featherston’s bound to have some good forgers in Richmond, same as we’re bound to be forging Confederate papers.”

“No offense taken, sir,” Levitt said. “As long as your force gets rolling by that date, what happens beforehand doesn’t matter.”

“Ha!” Dowling muttered. Major Levitt was a General Staff officer. To them, logistics was an abstract science like calculus. They didn’t have to worry about moving actual men and guns and munitions and fuel and food. Abner Dowling did, and knew his supply train was as flimsy as the rest of the alleged Eleventh Army. “Major Toricelli!” he called. “Can I see you for a moment?”

“Yes, sir?” Toricelli was in the office in nothing flat, sending Levitt a suspicious look. “What is it?”

Dowling handed him the orders. “Please get confirmation of these from Philadelphia. Until we have it, Major Levitt is not to leave this building.”

“Yes,
sir
!” Toricelli gave Levitt a real glare this time.

“Highest security,” Dowling added. “Don’t compromise the orders to verify them.” Toricelli saluted and hurried away. Dowling nodded to Levitt. “Care for a cigarette?”