In at the Death (5 page)

“More propaganda,” he murmured with a sigh of relief. If the damnyankees wanted to drop their lies instead of high explosives, he didn’t mind a bit. Had that been a bomb falling on his head…

He stuck the sheet into a trouser pocket and forgot he had it till the next morning. Only when it crinkled as he moved did he remember and take it out for a look.

Confederate soldiers, your cause is lost!
it shouted, and went on from there. It urged him to save his life by coming through the lines holding up the picture of the Stars and Stripes. Maybe U.S. soldiers wouldn’t shoot him if he did that, but it struck him as a damn good recipe for getting shot by his own side.

If his own side’s propaganda was bad, the enemy’s was worse.
Look at the disaster Jake Featherston has led you into. Don’t you want true freedom for your country?
it said. All Jerry Dover wanted—all most Confederates wanted—was to see the Yankees go away and leave his country alone. They didn’t seem to understand that. If the sheets falling from the sky meant anything, they thought they were liberators.

“My ass,” Jerry Dover said, as if he had a U.S. propaganda writer in the tent with him. The United States had invaded the Confederate States four times in the past eighty years. If they thought they’d be welcomed with anything but bayonets, they were even bigger fools than Dover gave them credit for—not easy but not, he supposed, impossible.

And if the Confederates wanted to change their government, they could take care of it on their own. All the bodyguards in the world wouldn’t keep Jake Featherston alive for long if enough people decided he needed killing. No Yankees had to help.

Dover started to chuck the propaganda sheet, then changed his mind. “My ass,” he said one more time, now happily, and put it back in his pocket. As with the story in
The Armored Bear
, he could treat it as it deserved.

N
ovember in the North Atlantic wasn’t so bad as January or February, but it was bad enough. The
Josephus Daniels
rode out one big swell after another. On the destroyer escort’s bridge, Sam Carsten felt as if he were on God’s seesaw. Up and down, up and down, up and down forever.

“You still have that hydrophone contact?” he shouted down the speaking tube to Vince Bevacqua.

“Yes, sir, sure do,” the chief petty officer answered. “Coming in as clear as you can expect with waves like this.”

“All right, then. Let’s give the submersible two ashcans,” Sam said. “That’ll bring it to the surface where we can deal with it.”

He shouted the order over the PA system. The launcher crew at the
Josephus Daniels
’ bow sent the depth charges flying into the ocean one at a time, well ahead of the ship. They were set to detonate not far below the surface. Sam felt the explosions through the soles of his feet.

Something rude came out of the speaking tube. “Had my earphones on when the first one burst,” Bevacqua said. “That’ll clean your sinuses from the inside out.” He paused, then went on, “The sub’s making noises like it’s blowing water out of its dive chambers. Ought to be coming to the surface.”

“We’ll be ready for anything,” Carsten promised.

And the destroyer escort was. Both four-inchers bore on the submarine when it surfaced. So did several of the the ship’s twin 40mm antiaircraft guns and her .50-caliber machine guns. A swell washed over the sub’s bow—and almost washed over the conning tower, too. This weather was tough to take in the
Josephus Daniels
. It had to be ten times worse in a submersible.

Sailors ran up a flag on the sub: the white, black, and red jack of the Imperial German Navy. Sam breathed a sigh of relief. “This is the one we’re supposed to meet, all right,” he said.

“So it would seem, sir,” Lieutenant Myron Zwilling agreed. Sam wished he had more use for the exec. Zwilling was brave enough and more than willing enough, but he had all the warmth and character of an old, sour-smelling rag. Men obeyed him because he wore two stripes on his sleeve, not because he made them want to.

The submersible’s signal lamp started flashing Morse. “We—have—your—package,” Sam read slowly. “He knows English, then. Good.”

He handled the destroyer escort’s blinker himself.
WILL APPROACH FOR PICKUP
, he sent back.

COME AHEAD. BE CAREFUL IN THESE SEAS
, the sub signaled.

Sam wished Pat Kelly were still aboard. But his old exec had a ship of his own, a newer, faster ship than the
Josephus Daniels
. He was probably showing his whole crew what a demon shiphandler he was. Sam wasn’t, and never would be. Neither was Zwilling. Since he wasn’t, Sam kept the conn himself.

As he steered closer to the submersible, he ordered Bevacqua to keep paying close attention to any echoes that came back from his hydrophone pings. The CPO laughed mirthlessly. “Oh, I’m on it, Skipper. Don’t you worry about that,” he said. “It’s my neck, too, after all.”

“Good,” Sam said. “Long as you remember.”

German subs weren’t the only ones prowling the North Atlantic. Plenty of U.S. boats were out here, too. More to the point, so were British, French, and Confederate submarines. The odds against any one of them being in the neighborhood were long, but so were the odds against filling an inside straight, and lucky optimists did that every day.

In both the Great War and this one, U.S. admirals and their German counterparts dreamt of sweeping the British and French fleets from the North Atlantic and joining hands in the middle. It hadn’t happened then, and it wouldn’t happen this time around, either. The enemy kept the two allies apart, except for sneaky meetings like this one.

NEAR ENOUGH
, the submersible’s captain signaled. But Sam steered closer, anticipating the next swell with a small motion of the wheel. The sub’s skipper waved to him then, seeing that he knew what he was doing. He lifted one hand from the wheel to wave back.
THROW A LINE
, came the flashes from the ugly, deadly, rust-streaked boat.

IS THE PACKAGE WATERPROOF
? Sam asked.

J
A
, the submersible skipper answered. Sam knew more German than that; his folks had spoken it on the farm where he grew up. He ordered a line thrown. A German sailor in a greasy pea jacket and dungarees ran along the sub’s wet hull to retrieve it. Sam wouldn’t have cared to do that, not with the boat pitching the way it was. But the man grabbed the line, carried it back to the conning tower, and climbed the iron ladder, nimble as a Barbary ape.

The German skipper tied the package, whatever it was, to the end of the line. Then he waved to the
Josephus Daniels
. The sailor who’d cast the line drew it back hand over hand. When he took the package off it, he waved up to Sam Carsten on the bridge.

After waving back, Sam got on the blinker again:
WE HAVE IT. THANKS AND GOOD LUCK.

LIKEWISE FOR YOU
, the German answered. He lifted his battered cap in salute. Then he and the other men on the conning tower disappeared into the dark, smelly depths of the submersible. The boat slid below the surface and was gone.

A moment later, the sailor brought the package—which was indeed wrapped in oilskins and sheet rubber, and impressively sealed—up to the bridge. “Here you go, sir,” he said, handing it to Sam and saluting.

“Thanks, Enos,” Carsten answered. The sailor hurried away.

“Now into the safe?” the exec asked.

“That’s what my orders are,” Sam agreed.

“Wonder why the brass are making such a fuss about it,” said Thad Walters, the Y-ranging officer.

“Beats me,” Sam answered with a grin. “They pay me
not
to ask questions like that, so I’m going to lock this baby up right now. Mr. Zwilling, come to my cabin with me so you can witness that I’ve done it. Mr. Walters, you have the conn.” Having a witness was in the orders, too. He’d never had anything on board before that came with such tight security requirements.

“Aye aye, sir.” The exec’s voice stayed formal, but he sounded more pleased than otherwise. Red tape was meat and drink to him. He would have done better manning a desk ashore and counting turbine vanes than as second-in-command on a warship, but the Navy couldn’t fit all its pegs into the perfect holes. You did the best you could in the slot they gave you—and, if you happened to be the skipper, you did the best you could with the men set under you. If they weren’t all the ones you would have chosen yourself…Well, there was a war on.

Sam’s cabin wasn’t far from the bridge. It wasn’t much wider than his own wingspan, but it gave him a tiny island of privacy when he needed one. Along with his bed—which he didn’t get to use enough—he had a steel desk and a steel chair and the safe.

He shielded it with his body as he spun the combination so the exec couldn’t see it: more orders. The metal door swung open. “I am putting the package in the safe,” he intoned, and did just that. “The seals are unbroken.”

“Sir, I have observed you doing so,” Myron Zwilling said, like a man giving responses to a preacher in church. “And I confirm that the seals are unbroken.”

“All right, then. I’m closing up.” Sam did, and spun the lock once more to keep it from showing the last number.

“Now we go back to Boston?” the exec said.

“Just as fast as our little legs will carry us,” Sam replied. Zwilling gave him a look of faint distaste. Sam sighed silently; if the exec was born with a sense of whimsy, he’d had it surgically removed as a kid. And the
Josephus Daniels
’ legs were indeed little. She couldn’t make better than about twenty-four knots, far slower than a real destroyer. The only reason that occurred to Carsten for picking her for this mission was that she was one of the most anonymous ships in the Navy. The enemy wouldn’t pay much attention to her. If he didn’t command her, he wouldn’t pay much attention to her himself. As they left the cabin, Sam added, “I am locking the door behind me.”

“Yes, sir,” Zwilling said. “You’re also supposed to post two armed guards outside until you remove—whatever it is—from the safe.”

“Go get two men. Serve them out with submachine guns from the arms locker and bring them back here. I’ll stand guard in the meantime,” Sam said. “If Jake Featherston’s hiding under the paint somewhere, I’ll do my goddamnedest to hold him off till you get back with the reinforcements.”

“Er—yes, sir.” The exec seemed relieved to get away.

This time, Sam sighed out loud. Pat would have sassed him right back instead of taking everything so seriously. Well, what could you do?

Before long, the armed guards took their places in front of the door to the captain’s quarters. Sam went back to the bridge. “I have the conn,” he announced as he took the wheel from Walters. “I am changing course to 255. We are on our way back to Boston.” He rang the engine room. “All ahead full.”

“All ahead full. Aye aye, sir.” The response came back through a speaking tube. The black gang would wring every knot they could from the
Josephus Daniels
. The only trouble was, she didn’t have many knots to wring.

Every mile Sam put between himself and the spot where he’d met the U-boat eased his mind. That it also meant he was one mile closer to his own country did nothing to make him unhappy, either. He wanted nothing more than to get…whatever it was out of his safe and off his ship. He didn’t like having men with automatic weapons outside his door at all hours of the day and night. Were it up to him, he would have been much more casual about the mysterious package. But it wasn’t, so he followed orders.

He also followed orders in maintaining wireless silence till he got within sight of Cape Ann, northeast of Boston. A couple of patrolling U.S. seaplanes had already spotted him by then and, he supposed, sent their own wireless signals, but nobody—especially not his exec—would be able to say he hadn’t done everything the brass told him to do.

Two Coast Guard cutters steamed out from Rockport and escorted the
Josephus Daniels
across Massachusetts Bay as if she had royalty on board. Sam didn’t think the Germans could have dehydrated the Kaiser and stuffed him into that flat package, but you never could tell.

When a pilot came aboard to steer the destroyer escort through the minefields outside of Boston harbor, Sam greeted him with, “The powers that be won’t like it if you pick the wrong time to sneeze.”

The pilot had flaming red hair, ears that stuck out like jug handles, and an engagingly homely grin. “My wife won’t like it, either, sir,” he answered, “and that counts a hell of a lot more with me.”

“Sounds like the right attitude,” Sam allowed. Myron Zwilling clucked like a fretful mother hen. Yes, he worshipped at Authority’s shrine.

They got through the invisible barricade and tied up in the Boston Navy Yard. As soon as they did, a swarm of Marines and high-ranking officers descended on them. One of the captains nodded when he saw the guards outside Sam’s door. “As per instructions,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Sam said, and when was that ever the wrong answer?

Everybody waited impatiently till he opened the safe and took out the package. He wondered what would happen if he pretended to forget the combination. Odds were the newcomers had somebody who could jigger the lock faster than he could open it with the numbers.

“Here you go, sir.” He handed the package to a vice admiral. “Any chance I’ll ever know what this is all about?”

“No,” the man said at once. But then he unbent a little: “Not officially, anyhow. If you can add two and two, you may get a hint one day.”

Even that little was more than Carsten expected. “All right, sir,” he said.

“Officially, of course, none of this ever happened,” the vice admiral went on. “We aren’t here at all.”

“How am I supposed to log that, sir? ‘Possessed by ghosts—summoned exorcist’?” Sam said. The vice admiral laughed. So did Sam, who was kidding on the square.

II

C
amp Humble wasn’t perfect, but it came as close as Jefferson Pinkard could make it. The commandant probably had more experience with camps designed to get rid of people than anybody else in the business. One thing he’d learned was not to call it that or even think of it like that.
Reducing population
was a phrase with far fewer unpleasant associations.

That mattered. It mattered a surprising amount. Guards who brooded about the things they did had a way of eating their guns or otherwise doing themselves in. If you gave it a name that seemed innocuous, they didn’t need to brood so much.

Back at Camp Dependable, outside of Alexandria, Louisiana, guards had actually taken Negroes out into the swamps and shot them. That was hard on the men—not as hard as it was on the Negroes, but hard enough. Things got better when Jeff thought of asphyxiating trucks. Then the guards didn’t have to pull the trigger themselves. They didn’t have to deal with blood spraying everywhere and with screams and with men who weren’t quite dead. All they had to do was take out bodies and get rid of them. That was a hell of a lot easier.

And the poison-gas chambers he’d started at Camp Determination in west Texas were better yet. They got rid of more blacks faster than the trucks did, and saved on fuel besides. The prairie out by Snyder offered plenty of room for mass graves as big as anybody could want. Everything at Camp Determination would have been, if not perfect, at least pretty damn good, if not for the…

“Damnyankees,” Pinkard muttered. “God fry the stinking damnyankees in their own grease.” Who would have figured the U.S. Army would push into west Texas? One of the reasons for building Camp Determination way out there was that it was the ass end of nowhere. The enemy hadn’t seemed likely to bother a camp there.

But the Freedom Party underestimated how much propaganda the USA could get out of the camps. And earlier this year the United States had attacked everywhere they could, all at once: not seriously, but hard enough to keep the CSA from reinforcing the defenders in Kentucky and Tennessee, where the real action was. And it worked. Kentucky and Tennessee were lost, and Georgia was in trouble.

And Camp Determination was lost, too. The United States had bombed the rail lines coming into the camp so it couldn’t reduce population the way it was supposed to. And they’d also bombed the crap out of Snyder; Jeff thanked God his own family came through all right. The Confederate defenders finally had to pull back, so now the Yankees had all the atrocity photos they wanted.

And Jefferson Pinkard had Camp Humble. Humble, Texas, just north of Houston, lay far enough east that the United States wouldn’t overrun it unless the Confederacy really went down the drain. The USA had a much harder time bombing the rail lines that came through here, too. So Negroes came in, they got into trucks that took them nowhere except to death, or they went into bathhouses that pumped out cyanide instead of hot water. After that, they went up in smoke. Literally.

Pinkard scowled. The crematorium wasn’t up to snuff. The outfit that built it had sold the CSA a bill of goods. The smoke that billowed from the tall stacks stank of burnt meat. It left greasy soot wherever it touched. Sometimes bits of real flesh went up the stacks and came down a surprising distance away. You couldn’t very well keep Camp Humble’s purpose a secret with a thing like that stinking up the air for miles around.

Somebody knocked on the door to Jeff ’s office. “It’s open,” he called. “Come on in.” A guard with a worried look obeyed. Guards who came into the commandant’s office almost always wore a worried look; they wouldn’t have been there if they didn’t have something to worry about. “Well?” Jeff asked.

“Sir, we got us a nigger says he knows you,” the guard said.

“And you waste my time with that shit?” Pinkard said scornfully. “Christ on a crutch, McIlhenny, it happens once a trainload. Either these coons know me or they’re asshole buddies with the President, one. Like anybody’d be dumb enough to believe ’em.”

“Sir, this here nigger’s named Vespasian,” McIlhenny said. “Says you and him and another coon named, uh, Agrippa used to work together at the Sloss Works in Birmingham. Reckon he’s about your age, anyways.”

“Well, fuck me,” Jeff said in surprise.

“He’s telling the truth?” the gray-uniformed guard asked.

“I reckon maybe he is,” Jeff said. “The last war, they started using niggers more in factory jobs when white men got conscripted. I did work with those two, hell with me if I didn’t.”

“We didn’t send him on right away,” McIlhenny said. “Wanted to find out what you had in mind first. You want, we can get rid of him. Or if you want to see him, we can do that, too.”

“Vespasian.” Jefferson Pinkard’s voice was far away. He hadn’t thought about Vespasian in years. Sometimes the years he’d put in at the steel mill seemed to have happened to someone else, or in a different lifetime. But he said, “Yeah, I’ll talk to him. He wasn’t a bad nigger—not uppity or anything. And he worked pretty hard.”

“We were gonna put him in a truck,” the guard said. If they had, Vespasian wouldn’t be seeing anybody this side of the Pearly Gates. He looked apprehensive. Asphyxiating somebody the commandant really knew wouldn’t do wonders for your career.

“Well, I’m glad you didn’t.” Pinkard heaved his bulk out of the chair behind his desk. A lot of fat padded the hard muscles he’d got working in the foundry. He grabbed a submachine gun off a wall bracket and made sure the drum magazine that fed it was full. If Vespasian had some sort of revenge in mind, he wouldn’t go on a truck after all. Instead, he’d get ventilated on the spot. “Take me to him. He in the holding area?”

“Sure is, sir,” the guard answered. Camp Humble had one, to give the guards the chance to deal with prisoners who were dangerous or just unusual.

“You searched him?” Jeff took nothing for granted. Some of the people who worked for him were dumb as rocks.

But the guard nodded. “Sure did, sir. Up the ass and everything.” He made a face. “He ain’t got nothin’.”

“All right, then,” Jeff said. It sounded as if the men in gray were on the ball this time.

When they got to the holding area, he found two more guards aiming assault rifles at Vespasian. One of them blinked. “Be damned,” he said. “This mangy old coon wasn’t blowing smoke, then?”

Vespasian wasn’t exactly mangy, but he was only a shadow of the burly buck who’d worked alongside Jefferson Pinkard half a lifetime earlier. He was gray-haired and scrawny, and looked like a man who’d been through hell. If his train ride from Birmingham to Camp Humble was like most, he had. A powerful stench clung to him. He hadn’t washed in a long time, and hadn’t always made it to a toilet or a slop bucket, either.

He nodded to Jeff not as one equal to another, but as a man who knew another man, anyhow. “Really is you, Mistuh Pinkard,” he said, his voice desert-dry and rough. “Been a hell of a long time, ain’t it?”

“Sure as hell has,” Jeff answered. He turned to the guards. “Get him some water. Reckon he can use it.”

“Do Jesus! You right about that,” Vespasian croaked. When the water came—in a pail, not a glass—he drank and drank. How long had he gone without? Days, plainly. And when he said, “That was mighty fine,” he sounded much more like his old self.

“What ever happened to that no-account cousin of yours or whatever the hell he was?” Jeff asked. “You know the one I mean—the guy they threw in jail. What the hell was his name?”

“You mean Leonidas?” Vespasian said, and Jeff nodded. The black man went on, “They let him out after the las’ war was over—decided he weren’t no danger to the country or nobody else. He kept his nose clean afterwards. Got married, had a couple chillun. Died o’ TB a little befo’ the new war start.”

“How about that?” Jeff said. “I plumb lost touch with Birmingham lately.” He hesitated, then waved the guards away. “I’ll be all right, dammit,” he told them. “I got a gun, and he ain’t dumb enough to give me no trouble.” They didn’t like it, but the man who made the rules could break them, too. When the guards were out of earshot, Jeff asked Vespasian, “Ever hear what happened to that gal I used to be married to?”

“Yes, suh.” Vespasian nodded. “She went downhill pretty bad. Got to drinkin’ an’ carryin’ on with men. Ain’t heard nothin’ ’bout her in a while, though. Dunno if she’s alive or dead.”

“Huh.” Jeff ’s grunt was more self-satisfied than anything else. Run around on him, would Emily? Whatever she got after he cut her loose served her right, as far as he was concerned. “Bitch,” he muttered under his breath. “Probably had a goddamn taxi meter between her legs.”

Vespasian either didn’t catch that or had the sense to pretend he didn’t. He lifted the pail to his mouth again. Pinkard tensed. If he threw it…But he set it down and wiped his mouth on his filthy sleeve. “Ask you somethin’ now, suh?”

“Go ahead,” Jeff told him.

“What you do with me, now that I’m here?”

“You give people trouble?”

“Now, Mistuh Pinkard, you know I ain’t like that,” Vespasian said reproachfully.

“I sure do.” Jeff nodded. “I told McIlhenny the same thing when he said you were asking for me. So you just stay in the barracks and do like the guards tell you, and everything’ll be fine.”

“Sure weren’t fine comin’ here.” Vespasian didn’t sound as if he believed a word of it. He was nobody’s fool, evidently. Jeff knew what kind of lies he was telling. He didn’t have anything against Vespasian as a man, but he didn’t have the kind of affection for him that would have made him want to keep his former coworker around in defiance of the rules. The rules said the Confederacy needed to get rid of blacks. They caused the country more trouble than they were worth. From everything Jefferson Pinkard had seen, that was the gospel truth. And it was just Vespasian’s hard luck that he’d finally wound up at Camp Humble.

So Jeff shrugged and spread his hands and went right on lying. “I am sorry about that, honest to God. Wish it could’ve been better. But there’s a war on.” That was the handy-dandy excuse for anything these days.

“Ain’t no reason to leave a man in his own filth. Ain’t no reason to have people die on the way to this here place,” Vespasian said. “What’s gonna happen to us all now that we’s here?” Fear and apprehension roughened his voice.

“You got to remember, this is nothin’ but a transit camp,” Jeff said—one more lie piled on all the others. “You’ll get some food, you’ll get cleaned up, and we’ll send you on the way again.” And so they would, on a journey from which Vespasian wouldn’t come back. “Then you’ll sit out the war somewhere else. Once we’re done licking the damnyankees, I reckon you’ll go on back to Birmingham. We’ll sort all that shit out then.”

“I got to wait till we lick the USA, reckon I’ll be at that other camp forever,” Vespasian said.

The gibe held much more truth than Jeff wished it did. It also played on his own fears. He tried not to show that, but he did call the guards back. “Take him off to the barracks that’s scheduled for the bathhouse next,” he told them. “Once he gets cleaned up, we’ll go from there.”

“Yes, sir,” the guards chorused. One of them nudged Vespasian. “Come on. You heard the boss. Get moving.”

Away Vespasian went. Did he know Jeff had just ordered him liquidated? Pretty soon, he’d go up the crematorium stack, one more smudge of soot in a system that didn’t work as well as advertised. Jeff might have found a lesson there had he been looking for one. Since he wasn’t, he didn’t worry about it. He had a job to do, and he aimed to keep at it till it was done.

C
ongresswoman Flora Blackford was sick to death of war. She didn’t know of anyone in the USA who wasn’t. But she also didn’t know of anyone except a few fools and lunatics who wanted to make peace with the Confederate States and Jake Featherston. There’d been more doubt and disagreement during the Great War. Had the European powers patched up a peace then, odds were the USA and CSA would have done the same. Now…The one thing Featherston had done was unify the United States—against him. No arguments about workers’ solidarity now, not even from the hardcore wing of the Socialist Party. Getting rid of the enemy came first.

Her secretary stuck her head into Flora’s inner office. “The Assistant Secretary of War is on the line, Congresswoman,” she said.

“Thank you, Bertha. Put him through,” Flora said.

She picked up the telephone on her desk even before the first ring finished. “Hello, Flora,” Franklin Roosevelt boomed. “How are you this lovely morning?”

Flora looked out the masking-taped window. It was pouring rain, and the weatherman said there was a chance of sleet tonight. Winter hadn’t got to Philadelphia, but you could see it coming. Roosevelt’s office down in the bowels of the War Department was only a few blocks from hers. “Have you been down there so long you’ve forgotten it’s not July any more?” she asked.

He chuckled merrily. “Well, you can see when you come over.”

Telephone lines coming out of the War Department and the Congressional office building were supposed to be the most secure in the USA. Saying too much over them wasn’t a good idea anyhow. Roosevelt had something interesting, though. Flora was sure of that. “On my way,” she told him, and hung up.

Had the weather been halfway decent, she would have walked. As things were, she flagged a cab. Even the short ride showed her a couple of hits from the new Confederate rockets. They were aiming at the center of government, but weren’t especially accurate; they fell all over Philadelphia. No warning was possible. The only thing you could do to stay safe was to be somewhere else when they came down.

“Ain’t they terrible? Ain’t they wicked?” said the cab driver, a middle-aged woman. “How come we don’t got nothin’ like that?”

“I expect we’re working on them.” Flora wasn’t exactly giving away military secrets by admitting that.

“We shoulda done it first,” the cabby said. “Blow them Confederate bastards to kingdom come without our boys gettin’ hurt.”

“That would be good.” Flora thought of her own son. Joshua was in basic training now. Pretty soon, if the war didn’t end first, they’d give him a rifle and turn him loose on the enemy. The enemy, unfortunately, had rifles—among other things—too.