Drive to the East (72 page)

“Niggers!” somebody shouted. “Holy Jesus, there’s niggers loose in Plains!”

“Phone wires cut?” Cantarella demanded of Spartacus.

“We done took care of it,” the guerrilla leader said with a savage grin. “Don’t want no help comin’ from nowhere else.”

Here and there, townsfolk fired from windows with rifles or shotguns. Those houses got volleys of fire from the Negroes, as well as gasoline bombs to kill the resisters or drive them out in the open where they made easier prey. Moss also heard women’s screams that sounded more outraged than terrified. “You won’t find any fighting force in the world where that shit doesn’t happen,” Cantarella said. Moss nodded, which didn’t mean he liked it any better.

Somebody in Plains organized defenders who fought as a group, not as so many individuals. “Over here, Jimmy!” a woman called. “We got trouble over here!”

“Be there real quick, Miss Lillian!” a man answered. Moss got a glimpse of him in the firelight: a kid with a mouthful of teeth, wearing a dark gray C.S. Navy tunic over pajama bottoms. Home on leave? Whatever the reason he was here, he was tough and smart and brave, and he’d make real trouble if he got even half a chance.

He didn’t. Moss made sure of that. The Tredegar’s stock didn’t fit his shoulder quite the same way as the U.S. Army Springfield he’d trained with, but the difference didn’t matter. He pulled the trigger gently—he didn’t squeeze it. The rifle bucked. Jimmy, the Navy man here in the middle of Georgia, spun and crumpled.

“Good shot!” Spartacus yelled.

Without a commander who sounded as if he knew what he was doing, the defenders went back to fighting every man for himself. Spartacus’ raiders weren’t well disciplined, but they had a better notion of what they were doing than their foes. They killed as many whites as they could, started fires all over town, and faded back into the countryside. “Well,” Moss said, “we yanked their tails pretty good.”

“Sure did,” Nick Cantarella agreed. “Now we see how hard they yank back.”

C
larence Potter had been going at a dead run ever since he put on the Confederate uniform again. He’d been going even harder than that since the war started. And he was going harder still these past few weeks, since things started turning against the CSA.

To make matters worse, he and Nathan Bedford Forrest III flinched whenever they saw each other even if they were just getting bad fried chicken in the War Department cafeteria. He wished Forrest had kept his mouth shut. Now the chief of the General Staff had him thinking—always a dangerous thing to do.

What if Jake Featherston wasn’t crazy like a fox? What if he was just plain crazy, period? Around the bend? Nutty as a fruitcake? Two cylinders short of a motor?

“Well, what then?” Potter muttered. He wouldn’t have been surprised if there were microphones in his subterranean office. The President of the CSA wouldn’t need to be crazy to mistrust him, not after everything that had happened between them over the past twenty-five years. Featherston wouldn’t need to be crazy to mistrust his spymasters, either, no matter who they were. But that handful of words seemed safe enough; Potter could have been wondering about any number of things.

He laughed, as people will laugh when the other choice is crying their eyes out. The rescue drive toward Pittsburgh was moving forward. The map on his wall showed that. But it wasn’t moving forward fast enough. And the cargo airplanes that were supposed to supply the Confederates trapped in the Pittsburgh pocket were taking an ungodly beating. Potter didn’t know what the officers who’d promised transports could do the job had been smoking. Whatever it was, he wished he had some now. Reality needed some blurring.

And Featherston still wouldn’t let the men in the pocket fight their way west to meet their would-be rescuers, either. “What we have, we hold!” he said, over and over again. Clarence Potter didn’t know what he’d been smoking, either.

Just to make matters more delightful, Lubbock was liable to fall. Some of the nuisance drives the USA had launched to keep the Confederates from strengthening themselves for the rescue effort in Ohio and Pennsylvania were turning into bigger nuisances than even the generals who’d launched them probably expected.

The Attorney General’s office, of all things, was having conniptions about this one. Somewhere southeast of Lubbock was something called Camp Determination. Clarence Potter didn’t know what that was, not in any official way. He didn’t
want
to know, not in any official way. He had a pretty good unofficial idea.

He also saw the need for places like that. Negro raiders were getting more and more annoying. That Navy man in that little Georgia town, shot down in front of his mother . . . Half the town was wrecked, too, and it wasn’t the only one guerrillas had hit. Two people bombs in Augusta, one in Savannah, another in Charleston . . .

Potter whistled tunelessly between his teeth. The really alarming part was, things could have been worse. The USA did only a halfhearted job of supplying black guerrillas. Whites up there didn’t love them, either. If the damnyankees had gone all-out, they could have caused even more trouble than they did.

One bit of good news—Mexican troops would take some of the spook-fighting off the CSA’s hands. Potter didn’t know what Jake Featherston said to Maximilian. Whatever it was, it got the Emperor of Mexico moving. It probably scared the living bejesus out of him, too. Jake Featherston was not a subtle man.

Someone knocked on Potter’s door. He paused to put a couple of papers into drawers before he said, “Come in.”

“Here you are, sir.” A lieutenant handed him a manila envelope.

“Thanks,” Potter said. “Do I need to sign for it?”

“No, sir,” the junior officer answered, which surprised him.

“All right, then.” The lieutenant saluted and disappeared. When Potter opened the envelope, he understood. It was a progress report from Henderson V. FitzBelmont. That project was so secret, it didn’t have a paper trail. This way, no Yankee spy filing sign-off sheets would wonder about it. Better safe.

He quickly read through the report. It was, for the most part, an account of technical difficulties. Uranium hexafluoride was poisonous and savagely corrosive. FitzBelmont and his people were still working out techniques for handling it. Till they did, separating U-235 from U-238 couldn’t even start.

Do you have any idea how the U.S. project is proceeding?
FitzBelmont wrote. Potter didn’t. He wished he did. He didn’t think anyone in the Confederate States did. If someone did, the report would have come through him . . . wouldn’t it? If it didn’t, it would have gone only one place: straight to Jake Featherston. The President knew Potter was loyal to the CSA—otherwise, he wouldn’t have got involved in this uranium business in the first place. So everyone else in the country was probably as ignorant as he was about Yankee progress, if any.

Featherston didn’t seem to have found out he and Nathan Bedford Forrest III had met, there in Capitol Square. If the President did know, neither man would still be free. Potter’s first thought was that neither would still be alive. After a moment, he realized that wasn’t necessarily so. Some of the people Ferd Koenig bossed could keep a man alive and hurting for a long, long time before they finally gave him peace—or maybe just made a mistake and hit him too hard or once too often.

Potter rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter on his desk and started an answer to Professor FitzBelmont. If he worked on something important, he wouldn’t have to think about some of the people who took the Attorney General’s orders.
Dear Professor,
he typed,
I hope you and your fmaily are well.
The error in the first sentence assured FitzBelmont the letter really came from him: a simple code, but an effective one.
Thank you for your recent letter, which I have just received. I wish I were more familiar with the Japanese project you mention, but I am afraid I cannot tell you how close they are to invading the Sandwich Islands.

That, of course, was also code. It might be obvious to anyone who intercepted the letter that Potter wasn’t talking about Japan. What he was talking about wouldn’t be so obvious, though. He wondered if the Japanese were working on nuclear fission. They weren’t white men, but they’d proved they could play the white man’s game. He shrugged. That wasn’t his worry. It was probably the USA’s nightmare. If one bomb could wreck Pearl Harbor or Honolulu, how did you defend them?

Back to what was his problem. He clacked away at the big upright machine. It had a stiff action, but that didn’t matter; he was a two-fingered typist with a touch like a tap-dancing rhinoceros.
You did not state when we could expect success from your own work. Its early completion could result in a major increase in efficiency. Hoping to hear from you soon on this point, I have the honor to remain. . . .
He finished the flowery closing phrases on automatic pilot, took out the sheet of paper, and signed the squiggle that might have been his name.

He put the letter in an envelope, sealed it, and wrote Professor FitzBelmont’s name and
Washington University
on the outside. Then he took it down the hall to the couriers’ office, first carefully locking the door to his own office behind him. He nodded to the major in charge of the War Department’s secret couriers. “Morning, Dick,” he said. “I need one of your boys to take this out of the city.”

“Yes, sir. We can do that.” The dispatching officer took the envelope, glanced at the address, and nodded. “Do you want someone who’s been there before, or a new man?” That was the only question he asked. Who Henderson V. FitzBelmont was and what the professor was working on were none of his business, and he knew it.

“Either way will do,” Potter answered. FitzBelmont might recognize a courier he’d seen before. Then again, he might not. He wasn’t quite the absentminded professor people made jokes about, but he wasn’t far removed, either. Potter got the feeling subatomic particles and differential equations were more real to him than most of the human race.

“We’ll take care of it, then,” the major said. “You’ll want the courier to report delivery, I expect?”

“Orally, when he gets back here,” Potter said.

The major raised an eyebrow. Potter looked back as if across a poker table. He held the high cards, and he knew it. So did the major. “Whatever you say, sir.”

“Thanks, Dick.” Potter went back to his own office.
Whatever you say, sir.
He liked the sound of that. As a general, he heard it a lot. The more he heard it, the more he liked it.

How long had it been since Jake Featherston heard anything but,
Whatever you say, sir?
Since he took the oath of office in 1934, certainly. In most things, nobody’d tried arguing with him for years before that. And he was a man who’d liked getting his own way even when he was only an artillery sergeant.

If somebody had tried telling the President more often, the country might be in better shape right now. Or it might not—Featherston might just have ordered naysayers shot or sent to camps. He’d done a lot of that.

Potter lit a cigarette and blew a meditative cloud of smoke up toward the ceiling. Two questions: was Jake Featherston leading the Confederate States to ruin, and could anybody else do a better job if Featherston came down with a sudden case of loss of life?

With the building disaster in Pittsburgh, with Featherston’s stubborn refusal to cut his losses and pull out (which looked worse now than it had when Nathan Bedford Forrest III and Potter sat on the park bench), the answer to the first had gone from
unlikely
through
maybe
and on toward
probably,
even if it hadn’t got there yet.

As for the second . . . Potter blew out more smoke. That wasn’t nearly so obvious. Nobody could wear Jake Featherston’s shoes. The Vice President? Don Partridge was a cipher, a placeholder, somebody to fill a slot because the Confederate Constitution said you needed to fill it. His only virtue was knowing he was a lightweight. Ferdinand Koenig? The Attorney General would have the Freedom Party behind him if the long knives came out. He was able enough, in a gray, bureaucratic way, but about as inspiring as a mudflat. As a leader . . . ? Potter shuddered. Ferd Koenig was one of those people who made a terrific number two but a terrible number one. Unlike some of them, he had the sense to realize it.

Which left—who? Congress was a Freedom Party rubber stamp. Potter couldn’t think of any governor worth a pitcher of warm spit. Besides, most people outside a governor’s home state had never heard of him.

What about Forrest?
Clarence Potter blinked, there in the privacy of his office. He was surprised the idea had taken so long to occur to him. He laughed at himself. “You old Whig, you,” he murmured. If the armed forces were going to overthrow the President—and it wouldn’t happen any other way—who better to take over the government than the chief of the General Staff? The Freedom Party had danced on the spirit of the Constitution while holding on to most of the letter. Throwing it out the window altogether seemed not just unnatural but wicked. But Forrest just might do.

Losing the war is wicked. Anything else? Next to losing this war to the USA, anything else looks good. Anything at all.
Potter nodded decisively. About that, he had no doubts at all. The United States had forced a harsh peace on the Confederate States in 1917, but hadn’t kept it going for very long. Terms would be even worse this time, and the United States would make sure the Confederates never got off their knees again.

The next time Potter saw Nathan Bedford Forrest III in the cafeteria, he nodded casually and said, “Something I’d like to talk to you about when we have the chance.”

“Really?” Forrest said, as casually. “Can we do it here?”

Potter shook his head. “No, sir,” he answered. “Needs privacy.” From one general to another, that wasn’t a surprising thing to say. For a split second, Forrest’s eyes widened. Then he nodded and put some silverware on his tray.

M
ichael Pound grinned as his barrel rumbled forward, jouncing over rubble and grinding a lot of the big chunks into smaller ones. “Advancing feels good, doesn’t it, sir?” he said.