The Grapple (57 page)

“If he doesn’t know, it’s not because he hasn’t been told,” Potter said. “I believe he’s doing everything he knows how to do. I believe he’s the best man we’ve got for the slot, too. Whatever else he is, he’s bright.”

“What about the men the damnyankees have?” Featherston asked. “Have you worked out some kind of way to hit ’em up in Washington again?”

“If we can land a mortar team by submersible, it might be able to get close enough to shell their operation,” Potter said. “I’m not sure how far out their ground perimeter extends. I don’t think we can hit them from the air again. They’re alert for that now. A lot of things you can do once, chances are you can’t do ’em twice. The ground operation would be a suicide run, too, chances are.”

“Yeah, chances are,” Jake agreed. “Either you get dedicated people who don’t care or you don’t tell ’em beforehand how dangerous the mission is. Both ways work.”

“If I can, I’ll use people who know what they’re doing and are willing to do it anyhow,” Potter said. “I don’t like sending people off to die when they don’t know that’s in the cards.”

“If you can, fine. But if you can’t, do it the other way. Don’t get thin-skinned on me, Potter,” Jake said. “This country is in trouble. If blasting the crap out of the U.S. uranium factory helps get us out of trouble, we do it. Period. We do it. You got that?”

“Oh, yes, Mr. President. I’ve got it. You’re always very plain about what you want.” Clarence Potter spoke respectfully. He spoke obediently. How, then, did he make Jake feel as if he’d just got slapped in the face? He had all kinds of unpleasant talents.

Jake held up a hand. “One other thing I need to find out. Any sign the Yankees know where our uranium works is at?”

“Sir, the first sign of that you’d get would be every U.S. bomber ever built coming straight at Washington University with the heaviest load of bombs it could carry,” Potter answered.

He was bound to be right. And he was serious, too; when he talked about the Confederate uranium-bomb project, the subtle mockery disappeared from his voice. He was a Confederate patriot. Jake Featherston used that button to keep him loyal to the Freedom Party—and loyal to the President of the CSA, too. If Potter ever separated Jake Featherston’s cause from the Confederacy’s…
If that ever happens, I’ve got to get rid of him, because then he turns as dangerous as a rattler in my bed,
Jake thought.
I’d better keep a closer eye on him.

None of his thoughts showed on his face. All he said was, “You’re doing a good job of keeping the secret, then. Thanks. That’s one more thing the country needs.”

“Yes, sir.” Again, Potter sounded brisk and assured. But he couldn’t resist one more gibe: “We’d be further along now if FitzBelmont got funding sooner.”

“Oh, give me a break!” Jake exclaimed—that rubbed him the wrong way. “He came to me with this blue-sky story an idiot dog wouldn’t believe. So maybe it’ll turn out to be true. I hear a dozen blue-sky stories every day, and damn near all of ’em are nothing but shit. Would
you
have believed this one way back then?”

Potter pursed his lips. “Well, no,” he admitted—he was almost compulsively honest. “But somebody made the United States believe it. I wonder how that happened.”

“The United States follow the Germans wherever they go—maybe that’s got something to do with it,” Jake said. “I wonder how far along England and France are. Got any ideas?”

“No, Mr. President. They aren’t talking to me.”

“To me, neither,” Jake snarled. “They reckon I’m a poor relation. Well, when we get this here bomb, I’ll show ’em who’s a poor relation to who, by God. See if I don’t. The whole damn
world
’ll see if I don’t.”

J
efferson Pinkard heard the distant boom of artillery off to the northwest. He’d heard it before, but only as a rumble on the edge of audibility. Now it was louder and more distinct than he’d ever known it. That meant only one thing: the damnyankees were closer to Camp Determination than they’d ever got before.

When Pinkard called the local commander to complain, Brigadier General Whitlow Ling said, “If you want to put your guards under my command and send ’em off to the front here, I’ll listen to you. Otherwise, butt out of my business.”

“I can’t do that,” Jeff said.

“Then butt out of my business,” the Army man said firmly.

“But Camp Determination is important to the whole country,” Jeff said.

“And I’m doing every damn thing I know how to do to keep the U.S. Eleventh Army away from it,” Ling said. “If you think you’re helping when you joggle my elbow, you’d better think twice, ’cause it ain’t so.”

“We set up this camp way the hell out here so the Yankees couldn’t get at it,” Pinkard said. “We’ve got important business to take care of here.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Ling said. “All I know is, General Dowling has more men than I do. He has a better logistics train than I do. He has a fuck of a lot more airplanes than I do. You want miracles, go talk to Moses.”

“So don’t fight him straight up,” Jeff said. “Go around him.”

“And how am I supposed to do that, when Richmond won’t give me the barrels I need?” Brigadier General Ling seemed sure the camp commandant wouldn’t have an answer for him.

But, thanks to the newspapers and magazine, Jeff did. “Load machine guns and cannons onto a bunch of trucks and go raiding,” he said. “The Canucks are doing it to the USA. Hell, the damn niggers in Georgia and Mississippi are doing it to us. Can we fight as smart as a bunch of coons? Hope to God we can.”

Had he laid that on too thick? Would Ling hang up on him instead of listening? If Ling thought he could get away with that, he had another think coming, because Jeff would get on the horn to Ferdinand Koenig. If the Attorney General couldn’t make a mere soldier say uncle, Jeff was backing the wrong horse.

Ling didn’t hang up. He said, “You want us to turn guerrilla, then?”

“I don’t care what you call it, General,” Pinkard answered. “I want you to make the damnyankees stop. I want you to make ’em go backwards. I don’t give a rat’s ass how you do it. Here’s something you haven’t tried, that’s all. It’s worked good some other places. What have you got to lose?”

He waited. “It wouldn’t be that expensive,” Ling said in musing tones. “Wouldn’t cost that many men, wouldn’t cost that much matériel. Might be worth a shot.”

“Anything’s worth a shot right now, wouldn’t you say?” Jeff answered.

Ling only grunted. That was probably as it should be. A soldier wouldn’t admit his side was in trouble, even if it was—maybe especially if it was. If he hurt the troops’ morale, what would that do? Cause his side more trouble still. “We’ll see what happens,” Ling said at last, and he did hang up.

“Hooked him, by God,” Jeff said happily as he set down his own telephone. “I do believe I hooked him.” He hadn’t been sure he could.

He looked out through his window at the men’s half of Camp Determination. A long queue of Negroes waited to go into the bathhouse and delousing station. They would go in, all right, but they wouldn’t come out again—not breathing, anyhow. Guards with submachine guns flanked them to either side, to make sure nobody did anything stupid or desperate. Right this minute, everything seemed calm.

The camp was busier than it had been for a while, too. U.S. bombers had eased up on the railroad line leading into Camp Determination. They still hit it every so often, but repairs stayed ahead of damage now. And they’d eased up on Snyder, too. Pinkard thanked God for that. He had his family to worry about, and it mattered more to him than anything else in the world.

As much as he hated to do it, he’d just about decided to send Edith and her boys back to Louisiana. Maybe he would have looked at things differently if she weren’t expecting. But Alexandria was safe in a way Snyder wasn’t. Even though it also had a camp nearby, the United States were in no position to bomb it. If they brought bombers south, they wouldn’t bother with a half-assed target like Alexandria. They’d go and unload on New Orleans, which really mattered.

Jeff watched the queue snake forward. Everything went smoothly. He’d set it up so everything would, but seeing that it did still made him feel good. It wasn’t a guarantee these days. A year ago, all the Negroes who went through the camp believed the guards when they said the bathhouses and the trucks were just procedures to be put up with as they got transferred somewhere else. Not now. The blacks brought out of colored districts and the captured Red guerrillas had a pretty good idea of what went on here. Jeff blamed damnyankees propaganda for that. It made Camp Determination harder to run, because the inmates understood they had nothing to lose.

He breathed a silent sigh of relief when the last Negro moved through the barbed-wire gate and into the bathhouse. That meant he could go back to his paperwork with a clear conscience. It never went away, and it was the part of the job he hated most. He hadn’t signed up to be a bureaucrat. He’d signed up to
do
things, by God. But you couldn’t just do things, not in the CSA you couldn’t. You had to keep records to show you’d done them, too.

And you had to keep records about things that went wrong. He’d just sent away two more guards from the women’s side for having lesbian affairs with the prisoners, and one male guard who’d got caught cornholing colored boys. Those involuntary separations required a mountain of forms. You couldn’t just fire somebody for something like that. You almost had to catch people in the act, because those accusations could ruin somebody’s life.

One of the women was raising a stink. She denied everything on a stack of Bibles. Jeff didn’t care. He had witnesses to prove she’d been carpet-munching. That was dirty enough when a man did it to a woman (though Pinkard sure didn’t complain when Edith went down on him—oh, no!). When another woman did it, it was about as disgusting as cornholing. This gal had to go, and she would.

She’ll probably end up a girls’ gym teacher, someplace where word of this hasn’t spread,
Jeff thought. Under the Freedom Party, records were a lot more thorough and complete than they had been back in the old days, but they weren’t perfect, not by a long shot.

He’d just signed the last of the papers that would get rid of the dyke when air-raid sirens started wailing and airplane engines droned overhead. A minute or so later, the antiaircraft guns around Camp Determination thundered into action. In the camp compound, he watched guards hastily don helmets. Falling shrapnel could cave in a man’s skull.

The colored prisoners, of course, had no helmets. Jeff only shrugged. That wasn’t his worry. If one of the smokes got clobbered, well, so what? It only meant he was buying his plot a little sooner than he would have otherwise.

A thunderous explosion rattled the window in his office. It was safety glass reinforced with chicken wire, but it almost blew out anyhow. That wasn’t a bomb going off. That was a bomber crashing, and its whole load blowing up at once. The gunners didn’t nail very many, but every once in a while they came through.

Prisoners in the yard were pointing up in the sky at the bomber stream. They were cheering and dancing and urging the damnyankees on. Rage ripped through Pinkard. How
dared
they root for the other side? They deserved everything they were catching, all right. Whether they would have cheered for the United States if they weren’t catching hell from the Confederate States never once crossed his mind.

Not surprising, not when he had other, more important, things to worry about. The bombers started unloading on Snyder again. More antiaircraft guns protected the towns, but flak alone couldn’t keep bombers away. If the Confederacy had some fighters of its own in the air…

But the Confederacy damn well didn’t. Basically, Snyder had to sit there and take it.
I
will
get Edith and the boys back to Alexandria, so help me God I will,
Jeff thought. If the damnyankees were going to bomb innocent civilians…Again, he didn’t dwell on what the Confederates had done to innocent civilians on the other side of the border, let alone on what the men he commanded were doing to civilians right here in this camp.

He hated those strings of
boom! boom! boom!,
one right after another. Sure, Edith and Willie and Frank would be down in the storm cellar. Sure, it would take a direct hit to harm them. The odds against that were long. But it could happen, as he knew too well. And he couldn’t do one damn thing about it. He hated that even more.

Here inside Camp Determination, he was safe as houses. The Yankees had never bombed the camp. They cared more about the worthless niggers inside it than they cared about the honest white people they were trying to murder.

Another bomber exploded. This one sounded as if it blew up in midair. The United States were paying for things today, anyhow. Sometimes the bombers got off scot-free. That was just plain embarrassing. At least the gunners weren’t standing around with their thumbs up their asses.

Jeff knew losing a few bombers wouldn’t keep the USA from coming back. He also knew how helpless he was to do anything about it. What choice did he have but wait here till the raid ended and then go back to Snyder and see if he still had any family left?

None. None at all.

Bombers stayed above Snyder for most of an hour. As soon as the bombs stopped falling, Jeff jumped into the Birmingham that was his to use. He didn’t wait for a driver, but gunned the engine to life and roared off to find out if his family was all right.

He had to go off the road and onto the shoulder a couple of times to avoid craters. He was glad it hadn’t rained any time lately, or his auto might have bogged down. But the fires rising from Snyder made him mutter and curse and pray, all in a confused jumble.
He
knew what he meant, but he doubted anybody else, even God, would have.

Once he got into Snyder, he had to make more detours, both because of holes in the streets and because of burning buildings. The bombs hadn’t smashed the town’s one fire engine. Its bell clanged like the shrieks of a lost soul as it raced from one disaster to the next. How much good could it do at each stop? Some, maybe.