The Grapple (25 page)

“Jones said whites and blacks were in it together down here,” Sam said. “Do we have all the boats aboard? If we do, we better get out of here.”

They did. The
Josephus Daniels
made for the open ocean. Aboard her, sailors put on their own uniforms for the first time since setting out from Boston. They started dismantling the sheet-metal camouflage that turned her into a Confederate ship. When morning came, they would give her a proper paint job, too. They couldn’t bring her back into U.S. waters looking the way she did, not unless they wanted her sent to the bottom in short order.

“We got away with it,” Sam said to Pat Cooley.

“Did you think we wouldn’t, sir?” Cooley asked.

“Well, I’m damn glad we did,” Sam said, and let it go at that.

C
larence Potter fitted a new clip to his Tredegar automatic rifle. He worked the bolt to chamber the first round. That done, he was ready to empty the twenty-five-round clip into anything that looked even a little bit like trouble.

The Negro uprising in Richmond was having unexpected effects. One of them was reminding even officers who normally spent their time deep in the bowels of the War Department that war meant fighting, and fighting meant killing. Nathan Bedford Forrest III’s great-grandfather first said that, and the cavalry general from the War of Secession knew what he was talking about.

Small bands of blacks had managed to get out through the barbed-wire perimeter that was supposed to seal the colored quarter off from the outside world. Bombed-out buildings gave them hiding places uncountable during the day. When night fell, they came out and shot whoever they could find. Rumor said a Negro’d come close to killing Jake Featherston. Potter didn’t know if he believed rumor. He didn’t know how he felt about it even if it was true, either. He didn’t love the President of the CSA, but he knew the country needed him.

His own foxhole was just inside the colored district. “Come on!” he shouted to the Confederate soldiers entering the perimeter. “They’re shooting back from over there, and from over there, too.” The Virginia Confederate Seminary ordained black preachers; it was as close to an institution of higher learning as Negroes could have in the CSA. For now, its large, solid buildings made a splendid strongpoint for Negroes armed with old-fashioned bolt-action Tredegars, sporting rifles, shotguns, pistols, and whatever else they could get their hands on.

They even had a few mortars, perhaps captured, perhaps homemade, perhaps sneaked in by the damnyankees. But what they had was no match for the artillery, barrels, and air power the Confederacy used against them, to say nothing of the ground troops clearing them out one block, one building, at a time.

More Confederates, some in gray, some in butternut, led a long column of black captives out of the colored district. Any time a Negro hesitated, a soldier or Freedom Party guard shot him—or her. If Asskickers bombed apartment blocks into rubble, who could say how many people died in the explosions or in the fires that followed? And who cared, except the Negroes themselves? Anybody blown to bits now didn’t need shipping to a camp later. Population reduction came in all different flavors.

Antiaircraft guns started going off. Clarence Potter swore and dove into a foxhole. The Yankees sent fighters into Richmond whenever they could. Helping the black uprising was good for them, just as helping the Mormons helped the CSA. But the U.S. border was much closer to Richmond than the Confederates were to Salt Lake City.
Too bad,
Potter thought.

The U.S. fighters came in low, the way they always did. They blasted whatever they could, then roared off. A few bullets slammed into the sandbags that helped strengthen Potter’s foxhole. Dirt leaked out of them and onto him.

Leaking dirt he didn’t mind. Leaking blood was a different story. Potter straightened up again when he was reasonably sure the enemy airplanes were gone. A latecomer shot past then, but didn’t open up on him. He let out a sigh of relief. That could have been…unpleasant.

“Potter!” someone yelled. “Potter!”

“I’m here!” Clarence Potter shouted back. By Jake Featherston’s orders, no one named anyone else’s rank inside the perimeter. Shouting out for a general only made the man a tempting target for snipers. Quite a few officers and even noncoms didn’t wear their rank badges for the same reason. Potter did, but more from a sense of fussy precision than out of vanity.

He kept calling till the runner found his foxhole. “Here you are, sir,” the man said, and handed him a sealed envelope.

“Thanks,” Potter said. Things did happen outside this colored district, though proving as much wasn’t easy, not when the capital was on fire. He broke the seal, took out the papers inside it, read through them, and nodded to himself. “So that’s ready to get going, is it?”

“I don’t know what you mean, sir,” the runner said. “Do I need to take an answer back to anybody?”

“No, that’s all right. This just lets me know something’s going to happen. You can leave,” Potter answered. The young Confederate soldier didn’t seem sorry to disappear. No doubt he would have been happier running messages through the War Department’s miles of underground corridors. Potter couldn’t blame him. Rifle and machine-gun bullets hardly ever flew down those corridors. Here, now…

Well, he’d got this message where it needed to go. Potter lit a match and burned it. Confederate bombers flying out of extreme northwestern Sonora were going to try to hit the U.S. uranium works in western Washington. It was a gamble in all kinds of ways. Other C.S. bombers taking off at the same time would head toward Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Denver. With luck, the damnyankees’ fancy electronics—better than anything the CSA had—would make them concentrate on those other bombers, not on the ones that really counted.

With a little more luck, the bombers would do some real damage when they got over the target. They had to fly a long way to get there: something on the order of 1,200 miles. The Confederacy didn’t have long-range heavy bombers that could carry a big bomb load that far and then turn around and fly home. If the war broke out in 1945, say, instead of 1941, the Confederacy probably would have such airplanes. But the country needed to use what it could get its hands on now.

Even starting out with a light bomb load, those bombers wouldn’t be coming home again. They would land at a strip on Vancouver Island, a strip of whose existence the United States were—Potter fervently hoped—ignorant. Assuming everything went the way it was supposed to, pilots and aircrews would eventually get smuggled back to the Confederacy. Canadian rebels would wreck the aircraft so the USA couldn’t learn much from them. (So the Canucks claimed, anyhow. If they found people to fly those birds against the damnyankees, Potter suspected they would. He didn’t mind. He wished them luck.)

Assuming everything went the way it was supposed to…Clarence Potter laughed, not that it was funny. Things had a habit of going wrong. Any soldier, and especially any soldier in the intelligence business, could testify to that.

He laughed again. Assuming everything went the way it was supposed to, Richmond’s Negroes would all be in camps by now. Assuming everything went the way it was supposed to, Potter himself would be back under the War Department figuring out sneaky ways to make life miserable for the damnyankees and to keep them from making it miserable for his own country. That knowledge didn’t give him any great faith things would go the way they were supposed to.

But the Confederate States had to try. The United States started the race towards uranium sooner, and they were running faster. They had more trained people to attack the problem, and they had more industrial capacity to spare from straight-out, short-term war production.

“Thank you, Professor FitzBelmont,” Potter muttered, there in his foxhole. Who would have thought an unworldly physicist would see something a spymaster missed? Physics was FitzBelmont’s business, but all the same….

Even if everything did go the way it was supposed to, how long would this raid stall the United States? Days? Weeks? Months? Potter laughed at himself. He couldn’t know ahead of time. Neither could anybody else.

“The longer, the better,” Potter said. And that was the Lord’s truth. One raid on that facility might get through. A follow-up seemed unlikely to.

More Negroes came back past his foxhole. They were skinny and dirty. Despair etched their faces. They’d done everything they could to hold off the Confederate authorities. They’d done everything they could, and it wasn’t enough. Plenty of their friends and loved ones lay dead in the rubble from which they were pulled, and now they were going off to the camps in spite of everything.

Potter felt like waving good-bye to them. He didn’t—that was asking for a bullet. But the temptation lingered. Too bad, fools!

Of course, if the damnyankees won this war as they’d won the last one, they would jeer the Confederates the same way. And they would have won the right. Potter tried to imagine what the Confederate States would be like with U.S. soldiers occupying them. He grimaced. It wouldn’t be pretty. The Yankees got soft after the Great War. They paid for it, too. They weren’t as dumb as most Confederates thought they were. They weren’t dumb enough to make the same mistake twice in a row. If they came down on the CSA this time around, they’d come down with both feet.

Of itself, Potter’s gaze swung to the west, toward Washington University. How were Professor FitzBelmont and his crew of scientists doing? How much time did they need? How far ahead of them were their U.S. opposite numbers? How long would the C.S. bombers set the damnyankees back?

There. He was back where he started from. He had lots of good questions, and no good answers.

Rattling and clanking, a couple of Confederate barrels ground forward against the rebellious Negroes. They were obsolescent machines left over from the early days of the war: only two-inch guns, poorly sloped armor. Having to use them—and their highly trained crews—for internal-security work was galling just the same.

A machine gun in the ruins of a grocery opened up on the barrels. That wasn’t a C.S. weapon; it came from the USA. Its slower rate of fire made it immediately recognizable. Potter cursed under his breath. Yes, the damnyankees helped the Negro revolt in the CSA, the same as the Confederates helped the Mormons. But the Mormon uprising was fizzling out, while Negroes went right on causing trouble.

Bullets ricocheted off the forward barrel’s turret and glacis plate, some of them striking sparks from the armor. Even experienced soldiers tried to knock out barrels with machine guns, and it couldn’t be done. A Confederate infantryman fired an antibarrel rocket into the battered store. The machine gun suddenly fell silent. Antibarrel rockets were made for piercing armor plate. Confederate soldiers had quickly discovered they also made excellent housebreakers.

The barrels clattered on. When somebody with a rifle fired at them, the lead barrel sprayed the house from which he was shooting with machine-gun fire. But that rifleman was only a distraction. A skinny Negro kid—he couldn’t have been more than fourteen—leaped up onto the second barrel, yanked open the hatch over the cupola, and threw in a Featherston Fizz.

A C.S. foot soldier with a submachine gun cut him down a moment later—a moment too late. Flames and black, greasy smoke burst from all the turret hatches. The gunner got out, but he was on fire. He took only a few steps before crumpling to the ground, and writhed like a moth that flew into a gas flame.

Then the barrel brewed up as its ammunition cooked off. Fire burst from it. Potter knew the commander and loader were stuck in there. He didn’t think the driver or bow gunner got out, either.

Five good men gone. Five men who wouldn’t fight the USA again. Five men the CSA couldn’t afford to lose—but they were lost. Clarence Potter swore one more time. To his way of thinking, this proved the Confederacy had to get rid of its Negroes. What did they do but cause trouble and grief?

What the Confederacy might be if it treated Negroes like men and women rather than beasts…never even crossed his mind.

VII

F
lora Blackford was listening to a Navy captain testifying about support for black rebels in the Confederate state of Cuba when a page approached her and whispered, “Excuse me, Congresswoman, but you have an urgent telephone call outside.”

“Who is it?” she whispered back. This wasn’t the most exciting testimony the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War had ever heard, but it was important.

“Assistant Secretary Roosevelt,” the page answered.

“Oh.” Flora got to her feet. “Please excuse me,” she told her colleagues. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

The page led her to one of the telephones outside the hearing room. “He’s on this line.”

“Thank you.” Flora picked up the handset and said, “This is Congresswoman Blackford.”

“Hello, Flora,” Franklin Roosevelt said. “Can you come by here?”

“Right this minute?” she asked.

“Well, you might want to,” Roosevelt answered. And what did that mean? Something like,
If you don’t you’ll be sorry.
Flora couldn’t think of anything else it was likely to mean.

“On my way,” she said, and hung up. “Please apologize to the rest of the committee for me,” she told the page. “I’m afraid I need to confer with the Assistant Secretary of War.” The young man nodded and hurried away. Flora wondered what kind of connections he had, to be wearing a sharp blue suit instead of a green-gray uniform. She also wondered how long he would go on wearing his suit. Congressional pages did get conscripted. At least one had got killed.

And, as she hurried to the exit, she wondered what the other members of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War would think. People knew she often talked with Franklin Roosevelt. She hoped to heaven they didn’t know why. If they didn’t know why, what would they think? That she and Roosevelt were having an affair? He was married, but that mattered little in high government circles. Reporters knew better than to write such stories. People called it a gentleman’s agreement, though Flora had never seen anything very gentlemanly about it.

She walked over to the War Department. Sentries there scrupulously compared the photo on her ID card to her face. They searched her handbag. A woman took her into a closed room and patted her down. And they called Roosevelt’s office to make sure she was expected. Only when they were fully satisfied did a soldier escort her to that office far underground.

“Call when you need to come back up, ma’am,” the soldier said: a polite way of warning,
Don’t go wandering around by yourself.

“I will,” Flora promised.

Roosevelt’s chief secretary or administrative assistant or whatever he was led her in to the Assistant Secretary of War. Then the man left, closing the door behind him. Did he knew about the work on uranium bombs? Flora wouldn’t have cared to guess one way or the other.

“How are you, Franklin?” she asked.

“Oh, a little tired, but not too bad,” he answered. He looked worn and weary, as if he was running on too much coffee, too many cigarettes in that jaunty holder of his, and not enough sleep. Few people with important jobs were doing anything else. He nodded, perhaps trying to make himself believe it. “No, I’m not too bad myself, but the news could be better.”

“What is the news?” Flora asked.

“The Confederates bombed our Hanford facility in the wee small hours this morning.”

“Gevalt!”
She sank into a chair. Her knees didn’t want to hold her up. “How bad is it? Do I want to know?”

“Well, it’s not good,” Roosevelt said. “They know we’re working on this, they knew where we’re working on it, they know it’s important, and they must be working on it, too, or they wouldn’t try so hard to shut us down.”

Every word of that was true. But he hadn’t told her what she most wanted to know. “How much damage did they do?”

“Oh. That.” His resonant laugh filled the office. “Now that the sun’s up out there, we can see it’s less than we feared at first. They don’t have aircraft that can carry heavy loads a long way, and it’s hard to bomb accurately at night anyway. They hit some of the works, but they didn’t damage the plant where we’re separating U-235 and U-238 or the pile—that’s what they’re calling the gadget that makes more energy than goes into it.”

“That would have been bad,” Flora said. “Repairing those things would take a long time.” She didn’t even mention money.

“Repair isn’t the only worry. If the bombers hit those, we’d have to worry about radioactive contamination like you wouldn’t believe,” Roosevelt said. Flora must have looked blank, for he went on, “That kind of thing can cause cancer. It can poison you. If it’s strong enough, it can come right out and kill you. And it’s very hard to clean up.”

“But it didn’t happen?” Flora said.

“It didn’t happen. Hardly any contamination, in fact,” Roosevelt said.

“Good—I guess.” Flora hadn’t even thought about—what did Roosevelt call it?—radioactive contamination. She hadn’t known such a thing was possible, or that anybody needed to worry about it. She was just starting to realize how much she didn’t know about this whole uranium business.

“It’s very good, believe me,” Roosevelt said. “They could have made things worse for us than they did. We’re not badly delayed, anyhow.”

“That
is
good,” Flora said. “What kind of program do the Confederate States have? How far along are they? How do we go about finding out?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, and we’ll have to find a way, respectively.” The Assistant Secretary of War sighed. “That’s all I can tell you right now. As I say, they’re working on it, the same as we are. We’re in a race, and we’d better win.”

Eight words. As far as Flora could see, they said everything that needed saying. “If we knew where they’re working, we could visit them the same way they just visited us,” she said.

“If we knew that, we would have done it a long time ago,” Roosevelt said. “We’ve got to look harder, that’s all.”

“It’s a long way from Confederate territory to Washington State,” Flora said. “That’s one of the reasons you put the uranium works out there, I suppose. How did they manage to fly bombers all the way up there? And what happened to them afterwards?”

“They got cute,” Franklin Roosevelt said unhappily. “I don’t know what else to tell you. They flew a whole swarm of airplanes out of northwestern Sonora. Some of them headed for Los Angeles. Some attacked Las Vegas and Boulder Dam in Nevada. And some…some we just forgot about.” He looked angry and embarrassed at the same time. “Airplanes flying over the middle of the country—too many people assumed they were ours and didn’t worry about them. That won’t happen again, either.”

“They didn’t go back to the CSA, did they?” Flora asked.

He shook his strong-chinned head. “No. We might have done something about that. I hope to heaven we would have done something about it, anyhow. But they flew on to Vancouver Island and landed at strips there. The crews were gone by the time we got people there, and they set fire to the airplanes—or maybe the Canadians who helped them get away did. I don’t know about that. I do know it was a very smart operation, and we’re lucky it didn’t hurt us a lot worse than it did.”

“What can we do to make sure it doesn’t happen again?” Flora asked.

“You do know the right questions to ask,” Roosevelt said. Flattery? Truth? Both at once? He went on, “From now on, we’ll have fighters overhead all the time. That’s effective immediately. We’ll beef up the antiaircraft guns as soon as we can, and we’ll put a Y-ranging station close by so we can spot the enemy a long way off. And we’ll hit Confederate airports in Sonora and Chihuahua and even Texas to make it harder for them to fly up north.”

“What do we do about auto bombs? What do we do about people bombs?” Flora asked.

“Well, the area is well fenced, and the fences are a long way out from the buildings—for one thing, we need room if experiments get out of hand,” Roosevelt answered. “We have a garrison there.” He wrote himself a note. “We’d better reinforce it, and we’d better add some armored vehicles, too. You
do
know the right questions.” Maybe he really meant it this time.

“Did we lose any important people?” Flora asked.

“No. Absolutely not. No. We don’t have as many first-rate physicists as Germany does, but we’ve got plenty of good people to take us where we’re going,” Roosevelt said. “And the bombers didn’t hit any of them last night, so
that’s
all right. If we find the Confederates’ project, striking them will hurt them more, or I hope so, anyway. They only have a third as many educated people as we do. They can’t afford to lose anybody.”

“One more part of the price they pay for leaving their Negroes as nothing but field hands,” Flora said.

“I agree. But they aren’t even field hands now. They’re…” Roosevelt paused.

“Victims.” Flora supplied a word.

“Yes, that’s what they are.” Roosevelt shook his head. “Strange to use a word like that in this day and age. Strange to use it like that, anyhow. If people drown in a flood, they’re victims. If a man runs a stop light and kills a grandmother, she’s a victim. But those aren’t accidents in the CSA. The Freedom Party is doing it on purpose.”

“Nobody up here wanted to believe that for the longest time,” Flora said.

“I still don’t want to believe it,” Franklin Roosevelt said. “But I have no choice. It’s true, all right. You deserve a lot of credit for making people see that.”

“I don’t want it. I wish I didn’t have it,” Flora said. “And speaking of such things, what are we doing to help the Negroes in Richmond?”

“What we can, which isn’t much,” the Assistant Secretary of War answered. “Our fighters strafe the Confederates. We bomb their positions as we can. Some of the weapons the Negroes are using, they got from us. Smuggling arms isn’t easy, but we do what we can.”

“The Confederates did a pretty good job of helping the Mormons in Utah,” Flora said.

“More space and fewer people out there,” Roosevelt replied. “Getting things into Richmond’s never been easy. The Negroes are making the most of what we got them—and of what they got on their own. I will say that for them.”

“They really can fight, can’t they?”

“It does seem that way.”

“Then why doesn’t the U.S. Army let our Negroes put on the uniform and go after the Confederates?” Flora asked. “God knows they have the incentive to do it.”

“I can’t change that policy myself, you know,” Roosevelt said.

Flora nodded impatiently. “Yes, of course. But you can recommend a course of action to the President. He could change it by executive order—I don’t think he needs the consent of Congress to enlist Negro troops.”

“I’d say you’re right about that,” Roosevelt replied. “My one worry is, I don’t know how our white soldiers would like Negroes fighting alongside of them.”

“Who’d have a better reason to fight hard than colored troops?” Flora said. “If I were a black man in uniform, I wouldn’t want to surrender to the Confederates. Would you?”

“When you put it that way, no,” Roosevelt admitted. “I’ll speak to President La Follette about this. You might do the same. The final decision will be up to him, though.”

“Yes,” Flora said. For the past year, Charlie La Follette wasn’t just someone who could help make the upper Midwest vote Socialist. He was the man who decided things, and he seemed to be doing it well enough. “I’ll talk to him, and we’ll see what happens after that.”

B
rakes squealing, the train pulled into the station. “Rivière-du-Loup!” the conductor called. “All out for Rivière-du-Loup!” He spoke French, as most people did in the Republic of Quebec.

Dr. Leonard O’Doull hardly noticed. To him, French seemed at least as natural as English.
Home,
he thought, and got to his feet. After two years away, Rivière-du-Loup looked very good indeed. After almost two years of war, the Republic of Quebec—officially neutral in the war that convulsed the rest of North America—looked very good indeed, too.

People waiting on the platform waved as he and two other men and a woman got off the train. Nicole dashed up to him. He squeezed the air out of his wife, then did the same with his son. “You should get married more often, Lucien,” he said. “It lets me take leave.”

Lucien O’Doull sent him a severe look. “You’re as bad as Uncle Georges,” he said. “I only intend to get married once, thank you very much.”

“As bad as me? Thank
you
very much, Lucien.” Georges Galtier, the younger of Nicole’s two brothers, was the family wit, the family cynic, the family punster and practical joker. Most of the Galtiers were swarthy and slight. Georges was dark, but almost as tall as Leonard O’Doull, and half again as wide through the shoulders. His older brother, Charles, stopped picking on him in a hurry when he began to get his full growth. Charles was no coward, but also no fool. No Galtiers were fools.

Charles came up to O’Doull now. He looked achingly like his father. Lucien Galtier, after whom O’Doull’s son was named, was several years dead. “Good to see you again,” Charles said gravely. “Good to see you safe.” He sounded like his father, too, though he didn’t have much of the old man’s whimsy. Georges had got all of that, and a little more besides. They both made successful farmers, though. Crops didn’t care if you were funny or not.

Hand in hand with Lucien stood his fiancée. Paulette Archambault was a dentist’s daughter; the match, if not made in heaven, was certainly one that had a lot of study behind it. Paulette had black hair and blue eyes and a nice figure. O’Doull had no trouble understanding what his son saw in her. “Welcome to the family,” he said.

“Thank you very much,” Paulette said. “There’s…a lot of it, isn’t there?”

As if to prove her point, Nicole’s three sisters, Susanne, Denise, and Jeanne, greeted O’Doull, too, each with a husband at her side. Jeanne, the youngest, was pregnant again. O’Doull tried to remember if this would be her fifth or sixth. He couldn’t. But all the Galtier children had big broods except for Nicole. Lucien O’Doull might be an only child, but he was an only with a raft of first cousins.