In at the Death (7 page)

The British ambassador winced, ever so slightly.
Ah, that got him
, Jake thought with an internal grin. The mere idea that backward half-colonials across the sea could get ahead of the high and mighty lords of creation on their own foggy island had to rankle.

To make sure it did, Jake added, “After all, we’re a long ways ahead of you when it comes to rockets. Ask the Yankees if you don’t believe me.”

Halifax winced again, more obviously this time. Jake Featherston’s internal grin got wider. “Quite,” Halifax muttered: a one-word admission of pain.

“Reckon we can work a swap?” Jake asked. “We’ll tell you what we know. We’re not afraid of our allies. If you want to shoot rockets at the Germans, more power to you. Blow ’em to hell and gone. I won’t shed a tear, and you can bet your…backside on that.”

“An interesting proposal,” the ambassador said. “I am not authorized to agree to it, but I shall put it to the Prime Minister. If he deems it feasible, we can proceed from there.”

“How long will that take?”

“My dear sir!” Lord Halifax spread his hands. “That’s in Winston’s court, I’m afraid, not mine. I will say he is not a man in the habit of brooking delay.”

Featherston wondered if they really did speak the same language. He thought he understood what the British ambassador meant, but he wasn’t sure. Hoping he did, he answered, “He’d better not wait around. You’re in trouble, and so are we. The more we can help each other, the better our chances, right?”

“One could hardly disagree,” Halifax said.

“Fair enough.” But Jake wasn’t smiling. He was scowling. “Thing you’ve got to remember is, this cuts both ways. You want what we know about rockets—any fool can see you do. You want to get, but you don’t want to give. And I’m here to tell you, your Lordship, sir, that ain’t gonna fly.”

Lord Halifax
was
a diplomat. If Featherston’s bluntness offended him, he didn’t let on. “I assure you, Mr. President, I intend to make your views plain to the Prime Minister. What happens after that is up to him.”

Jake knew perfectly well he would have the hide of any Confederate ambassador who exceeded his authority. In fairness, he couldn’t blame Winston Churchill for feeling the same way. But his definition of fairness was simple. If he got what he wanted, that was fair. Anything less, and the other side was holding out on him.

Most of the time, he admired Churchill. Like him, the Prime Minister had spent much too long as a voice crying in the wilderness. In a way, Churchill had a tougher job than he did. Britain needed to worry about fighting both the USA and the German Empire.

But Britain hadn’t been invaded the last time around. She hadn’t been disarmed and had to start over. All she’d lost was Ireland—and the way the Irish felt about their longtime overlords meant she might be better off without it. With Ireland gone, the British didn’t have to worry about keeping the lid on a country where a third of the population hated the guts of the other two-thirds. Ireland was under British control now, to keep the USA from using it as a forward base, but military occupation had a whole different set of rules. The limeys weren’t as tough on the micks as the Freedom Party was on Confederate Negroes, but they didn’t take any crap, either.

“Tell him not to wait around, that’s all,” Jake said. “For his sake and ours.”

“Winston is a great many things, but not a ditherer. He may from time to time find himself mistaken. He hardly ever finds himself unsure,” Halifax said. “I do not know what his answer will be. I am confident you will have it in short order.”

“Good. Anything else?” Jake was no ditherer, either.

“The United States are making a good deal of propaganda capital from that camp they captured in Texas,” Lord Halifax said. “Did you have to be quite so open in your destruction of the colored populace?”

“You know what, Your Excellency? I don’t give a shit how much the damnyankees squawk about that.” Jake wasn’t being truthful, but he didn’t care. He had to make the limey understand. “What we do inside our own country is nobody’s business but ours. We’ve had a nigger problem for hundreds of years—even before we broke away from England. Now I’m finally doing something about it, and I really don’t care who doesn’t like that. We’re going to come out of this war nigger-free, or as close to nigger-free as I can make us.”

“Your solution is…heroic,” Halifax said.

Jake liked that better than the British ambassador probably intended. He felt like a hero for reducing the CSA’s colored population. “I keep my campaign promises, by God,” he said.

“No one has ever doubted your determination.” Lord Halifax got to his feet. “If you will excuse me…” He left the President’s office.

When Lulu looked in after Halifax was gone, Jake Featherston asked, “Who’s next?”

“Mr. Goldman, sir.”

“Send him in, send him in.”

Saul Goldman had grown bald and pudgy in the twenty-odd years Jake had known him. That had nothing to do with anything. The little Jew still made a damned effective Director of Communications. Because he did, he could speak his mind to the President, or come closer than most of the glad-handing yes-men who surrounded Featherston.

“I don’t know how I can present any more losses in Georgia,” he said now. “People will know I’m whistling in the dark no matter what I say.”

“Then don’t say anything,” Jake answered. “Just say the Yankees are spewing out a pack of lies—and they are—and let it go at that.”

Goldman cocked his head to one side, considering. “It could work…for a while. But if Atlanta falls, sir, it’s a propaganda disaster.”

“If Atlanta falls, it’s a fucking military disaster, and the hell with propaganda,” Featherston said. “I don’t think that’ll happen any time soon.” He hoped
he
wasn’t whistling in the dark. The news from Georgia was bad, and getting worse despite the fall rains.

“You know more about that than I do. I’m not a general, and I don’t pretend to be,” Goldman said.

“Don’t know why the hell not,” Jake told him. “Seems like every damn fool in the country wants to tell me how to run the war. Why should you be any different?” He held up a hand. “I know why—you aren’t a damn fool.”

“I try not to be, anyhow,” Goldman said.

“You do pretty well. Half of being smart is knowing what you’re not smart at,” Jake said. “Plenty of folks reckon that ’cause they know something, they know everything. And that ain’t the way it works.”

“I never said it was,” Goldman answered primly.

“Yeah, I know,” Jake said. “You make one.”

A
s far as Irving Morrell knew, he was unique among U.S. generals, with the possible exception of a few big brains high up in the General Staff. His colleagues thought about winning battles. After they won one, if they did, they worried about the next one.

Morrell was different. He thought about smashing the Confederate States of America flat. To him, that was the goal. Battles were nothing in themselves. They were just the means he needed to reach that end.

Back when the CSA still had soldiers in Ohio, he’d drawn a slashing line on the map, one that ran from Kentucky through Tennessee and Georgia to the Atlantic. That was where he was going now. He aimed to cut the Confederacy in half. Once he did, he figured the Confederate States would do what anything cut in half did.

They would die.

The question uppermost in his mind now was simple: could he go on to the ocean without bothering to capture Atlanta first? Would the enemy die fast enough afterwards to make the risk worthwhile?

He pondered a map. The chart was tacked to the wall of what had been a dentist’s office in Monroe, Georgia, more than fifty miles east of Atlanta. He would have used the mayor’s office, but a direct hit from a 105 left it draftier than he liked.

Monroe had had a couple of big cotton-processing plants, both of them now rubble. It had had a couple of fine houses that dated back to the days before the War of Secession, both of them now burnt. War had never come to this part of the CSA before. It was here now, and it made itself at home.

Reluctantly, Morrell decided Atlanta would have to fall before he stormed east again. It gave the enemy too good a base for launching a counteroffensive against his flank if he ignored it. Too many roads and railroads ran through the place. He couldn’t be sure enough his air power would keep them all out of commission to ignore it. Taking chances was one thing. Taking stupid chances was something else again.

He didn’t want to charge right into the city. He aimed to envelop it instead. That way, the Confederates couldn’t do unto him as the USA did unto them in Pittsburgh. An attacking army that took a city block by block put its own dick in the meat grinder and turned the crank.

No help would come to Atlanta from the north or the east, and the bulk of the CSA’s strength lay in those directions. The Confederate States were like a snail. They had a hard shell that protected them from the United States. Once you broke through, though, you found they were soft and squishy underneath. How much could they bring in from Florida or Alabama? Not nearly enough—or Morrell didn’t think so, anyhow.

Back when he first proposed his slash, the General Staff estimated it would take two years, not one. When Chattanooga fell, he’d hoped to prove them wrong. He might yet, but racing ahead for the sake of speed wasn’t smart.

“Then don’t do it,” he muttered, and headed out of the office. On the floor lay the dentist’s diploma from Tulane University, the glass in the frame shattered. Morrell wondered whether the man was still practicing in Monroe or had put on a butternut uniform and gone up toward the front.

Two black men carrying rifles stalked along the street. They wore armbands with
USA
on them. White civilians fell over themselves getting out of their way. They waved and nodded to Morrell: not quite salutes, but close enough. He nodded back. The Negro guerrillas made him nervous, too. But they scared white Confederates to death, which was good, and they knew more about what was going on here than U.S. troops did, which was even better.

Sometimes they shot first, without bothering to ask questions later. Morrell was sure they’d killed a few people who didn’t deserve killing. But how many Negroes who didn’t deserve killing were dead all across the CSA? A little extra revenge might be too bad, but Morrell didn’t intend to lose any sleep about it.

Except for guerrillas, not many Negroes were left in and around Monroe, or anywhere U.S. armies had reached. White people seemed to suffer from a kind of collective amnesia. More often than not, they denied there’d ever been many blacks close by. In Kentucky, they said the Negroes mostly lived in Tennessee. In Tennessee, they said the Negroes mostly lived in Georgia. Here in Georgia, they pointed two ways at once: towards Alabama and South Carolina. Was that selective blindness, a guilty conscience, or both? Morrell would have bet on both.

“Young man!” A Confederate dowager swept down on him. “I need to speak to you, young man!”

Morrell almost looked over his shoulder to see whom she meant. He’d passed fifty a couple of years before, and his weather-beaten features didn’t seem young even to himself. But her gray hair and the turkeylike wattles under her chin said she was some distance ahead of him. “What can I do for you, ma’am?” he asked, as politely as he could.

“Young man, I know you come from the United States, and so are ignorant of a good deal of proper behavior, but I must tell you that colored people are not permitted to go armed in this country,” she said.

He looked at her. He did his best to look through her. “They are now.”

“By whose authority?” she demanded.

“Mine.” He tapped the stars on his shoulder strap.

“You should be ashamed of yourself, in that case,” she said.

Of itself, his hand dropped to the .45 he wore on his belt. “Lady, I think you better get lost before I blow your stupid head off,” he said. “You people did your best to murder every Negro you could catch, and you have the gall to talk to me about shame…There’s not a word low enough for you.”

“The nerve!” The matron flounced off. Reality hadn’t set in for her. He wondered if it ever would, or could.

Over in Texas, General Dowling had taken local big shots through the Confederate death camp and into the mass graveyard so they could see with their own eyes what their country had done. Some of them had the decency to kill themselves afterwards. Others just went on the way they had before.

Morrell wished he had one of those camps to show the locals. Then they wouldn’t be able to shrug and pretend there’d never been that many Negroes in this part of the CSA. But he feared the matron wouldn’t be much impressed afterwards. She was one of those people for whom nothing seemed real if it didn’t happen to her.

Somebody’d painted
YANKS OUT
! on a wall. Morrell grabbed the first soldier he saw. “Get some paint and grab a couple of these assholes and have ’em clean this shit up,” he told the man in green-gray. “If they give you a hard time, do whatever you have to do to get ’em to pay attention.”

“Yes,
sir
!” the soldier said, and went off to take care of it with a grin on his face.

Artillery rumbled, off to the northeast. Morrell cocked his head to one side, listening, gauging. Those were Confederate guns. The enemy was still trying to blunt the U.S. attack and drive Morrell’s forces back. He didn’t think Featherston’s men could do it. Before long, counterbattery fire or air strikes would make those C.S. gun bunnies sorry they’d ever been born, and even sorrier they’d tried messing with the U.S. Army.

From what Morrell had seen, the only thing Confederate civilians were sorry about was that their army hadn’t done a better job of keeping the damnyankees away. Somehow, that left him imperfectly sympathetic.

“General!” Another woman called to him. This one was young and blond and pretty, pretty enough to remind him how long he’d been away from Agnes. She also looked mad enough to spit nails.

“Yes?” He’d give her the benefit of the doubt as long as he could.

“Those niggers of yours!” she snapped.