Drive to the East (28 page)

Even so, a woman started to duck under the ropes to take a shortcut to the Capitol. “Get the hell out of there, lady!” a sergeant shouted at her. “You want to get your stupid ass blown off?”

“Well!” she sniffed. “Such language!”

The sergeant sighed and turned to Potter. “It ain’t like she hasn’t got enough ass so she couldn’t use some of it blown off,” he said. The Intelligence officer chuckled; indeed, the woman hadn’t missed any meals. The noncom, a member of the Bomb Disposal Unit, went on, “Jesus God, sir, you wouldn’t reckon people could be so stinking stupid, though, would you?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Potter said. “That kind of thing rarely surprises me. A lot of people
are
damn fools, and there’s not much you can do about it, except maybe try to keep them from killing themselves.”

“Ugly bitch wouldn’t have been that much of a loss.” The sergeant sighed again. “Still and all, I expect you’re right. I just wish the Yankees were damn fools.”

Potter pointed toward the hole in the ground where the sergeant’s colleagues were working. “If they made better ordnance, that would have gone off,” he said, though he knew Confederate munitions factories turned out their fair share of duds, too.

But the sergeant shook his head. “It ain’t necessarily so, sir. Some of these fuckers—uh, excuse me—”

“I’ve heard the word before,” Potter said dryly. “I’ve even used the word before.”

“Oh.” The sergeant eyed the wreathed stars on either side of his collar. “I guess maybe. Anyways, though, like I was saying, some of ’em have time fuses, so they go boom when people aren’t expecting ’em. You’ll have heard about that, won’t you?”

“I sure have,” Potter said. “So you have to get them out of there before they go off. I’d be lying if I said I envied you.”

“Sometimes we get ’em out. Sometimes we have to defuse ’em where they’re at,” the BDU sergeant said. “And that’s what I meant when I said I wished the damnyankees were fools. Some of their time fuses’re just time fuses. Then we race the clock, like. Some of ’em, though, some of ’em are booby-trapped, so they’ll go off when we start messing with the time fuse. They’ll put those on ordinary bombs, too, so they’ll explode if you tinker. Sons of bitches want to kill
us
off, see, so then more of their time bombs’ll work.”

“That’s . . . unpleasant,” Potter said. “How do you handle those?”

“Carefully,” the sergeant answered.

Potter laughed, not that the younger man was kidding. Here was a glimpse of a cat-and-mouse game he hadn’t imagined before. Of course the Yankees wanted to blow up the people who got rid of unexploded bombs. It made perfect military sense—but it was hard on the men of the BDU. He asked, “Do we do the same thing to them?”

“Beats me, sir,” the noncom said, “but if we don’t, we’re missing a hell of a chance.”

“All right. That’s fair enough—no reason to expect you to know,” Potter said. He could find out for himself—or maybe he couldn’t, depending on how tight security was. Discovering the answer to that might be interesting all by itself.

“Hey, Cochrane!” somebody bawled from the direction of the hole in the ground. “Give me a hand setting up the clockstopper. We’re going to need it on this son of a bitch.”

“The clockstopper?” Potter said, intrigued.

“Sir, I can’t talk about that,” the sergeant—presumably Cochrane—said. “Security—you know how it is. And now, if you’ll excuse me . . .” He sketched a salute and hurried away.

No bomb burst shattered the calm of Richmond in the next half hour, so Potter supposed the clockstopper and whatever other arcane tools the Bomb Disposal Unit brought to bear on the bomb did what they were supposed to do. The war spawned every kind of specialist, not all of whom operated with as many eyes upon them as did the men of the BDU.

After Potter went back to the War Department, he remarked on what he’d seen to Nathan Bedford Forrest III. He couldn’t very well breach security with the head of the General Staff; if Forrest didn’t have the right to know everything there was to know, nobody in the CSA did. (Given the way things were in the Confederacy these days, quite possibly no one but Jake Featherston did. Potter preferred not to dwell on that.)

As things turned out, he didn’t have to dwell on it, because General Forrest knew enough to satisfy his curiosity. Nodding, Forrest said, “The BDU men are some of the best we have. Every one of them is a volunteer, too.”

Potter couldn’t look out on Richmond from Forrest’s office, which had plywood in place of window glass. Before long, window glass here in the capital might grow as extinct as the passenger pigeon. Of course, the same was no doubt just as true in Philadelphia. After pausing to light a cigarette, the Intelligence officer said, “I hadn’t thought about it, but I’m not surprised. You wouldn’t want somebody who didn’t want to be there messing with those bombs.”

“That’s what everybody thinks,” Forrest agreed. “Let me steal one of those from you.” Potter gave him a smoke. He tapped it on his desk a couple of times to settle the tobacco, then stuck it in his mouth. Potter lit a match for him and held it out. “Thanks,” Forrest said. He took a drag, blew out a plume of smoke, and looked up at the ceiling. “A lot of men volunteer for the duty.”

“Good,” Potter said. “I’d worry if they didn’t.”

“Yes, yes.” Forrest sounded impatient. “When you put it that way, so would I. But do you know how long the average service career of a BDU man is?”

“No, sir,” Potter admitted. “I don’t have the faintest idea.”

“Two and a half months—I saw the number just the other day, so it’s fresh in my mind,” Forrest said. “We
need
a lot of volunteers. By the way, we don’t talk about that number to BDU personnel, not under any circumstances.”

“I believe it.” Potter also believed that BDU men could probably figure it out for themselves, or at least come close. They all had to be mourning friends and comrades. Two and a half months . . . That was worse than he would have guessed.
“Nos morituri te salutamus,”
he murmured.

Nathan Bedford Forrest III nodded. “The only good thing you can say about the business is that, if something goes wrong, it’s all over before the poor bastards know it. The bombs go off faster than the nervous system can react.”

“That does matter,” Potter said. He hadn’t been at the front in the last war, but he’d been close enough to have seen horrors aplenty. Dreadfully wounded men, as far as he was concerned, were worse horrors than the dead. No matter how gruesome a corpse was, it was beyond suffering. For the living, pain went on and on.

The telephone rang. “Forrest here,” Forrest said. Potter left. He didn’t wait for Forrest to wave him out because he lacked clearance to hear whatever the chief of the General Staff was talking about. Disappearing without being asked in such circumstances was part of the etiquette of the security-conscious.

Potter’s own above-ground office, to which he’d defiantly returned, also had plywood in place of glass. Glass, these days, was not only a luxury but a dangerous luxury. In a bomb burst, shards were so many flying knives. They could chop a man into hamburger in the blink of an eye. Potter knew that. He missed being able to see out even so.

One thing—since he couldn’t look out the window, he couldn’t use looking out the window as an excuse for daydreaming. He had to buckle down and tackle the work on his desk. And so, reluctantly, he did.

On top of the pile was an urgent request from the Mormons of Deseret for whatever the Confederacy could send them. Getting supplies to them was harder than it had been when the rebellion first broke out. The U.S. noose was tightening. Potter had known it would. In a way, encouraging and helping the Mormon uprising seemed dreadfully unfair. Those people had not a chance in the world of winning, but they were eager to try, eager to the point of madness. It was enough to make a man with a conscience feel guilty.

Of course, a man with that kind of conscience had no business getting into Intelligence in the first place. Potter knew as much. He also knew his damnyankee counterparts were doing everything they could to arm the Negro terrorists in the CSA. If turnabout wasn’t fair play, what was? The only thing he really felt bad about was that there were so many more Negroes in the Confederate States than Mormons in the United States. Blacks caused more trouble for his side than the religious maniacs did for the enemy.

He wondered whether some Confederate operative had suggested auto bombs to the Mormons or they’d come up with them on their own. Either way, they made a viciously effective weapon for the weak against the strong. Again, Negroes in the CSA had proved that—and continued to prove it whenever they got the chance.

We need to keep this uprising alive as long as we can,
he wrote.
Where else can we tie down so many U.S. soldiers at so little cost to ourselves?

Even though the question was rhetorical as he wrote it, he knew it did have a possible answer. If Canada flared into rebellion, the Yankees would need endless divisions to hold it down. But, despite assiduous efforts, the Confederates hadn’t made a lot of friends up there. To Canadians, they might as well have been Yankees themselves. That infuriated Clarence Potter—and every other Confederate who’d ever run into the problem—but fury didn’t do much good.

If any outsiders could make the Canadians rise up, the Confederates weren’t the ones. The British were. Potter paused thoughtfully. Winston Churchill was supposed to favor quixotic schemes like that—and keeping the USA busy was as much in Britain’s interest as it was in the CSA’s.

A memorandum from Potter would never reach the British Prime Minister. A memorandum from Jake Featherston, on the other hand . . . Potter nodded to himself. Churchill might not agree. That was the chance you took. But he wouldn’t be able to ignore the request from an allied head of state. And Featherston would look at a memorandum from Potter. The Intelligence officer paused for a moment to gather his thoughts, then began to write.

J
ake Featherston often felt busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. He sometimes thought he wouldn’t have wanted to become President if he’d known ahead of time how much work the job was. That wasn’t true—down deep in his heart, he knew as much—but it gave him something to complain about.

Take paperwork. He’d never known what an obscene word that could be till he came to the Gray House. No matter how much he gave to other people, he still had plenty and then some. Paperwork was the price he paid for being boss.

Every once in a while, he ran into something he really needed to see. When he came to a memorandum from Clarence Potter, he knew he had to read it. For one thing, Potter would give him a hard time if he didn’t. And, for another, even though he trusted the Intelligence officer about as far as he could throw him, Potter had a lefthanded way of looking at the world that was often valuable. By his own lights, Potter was a patriot. Where his lights and Jake’s corresponded, they got on fine.

As Featherston read through this scheme, he found himself nodding. “Yeah,” he said when he was done. “About time we got some help from our so-called allies.” He knew as well as anybody that Britain was heavily bogged down in western Germany, trying to hold on to the gains she and France had made when the war was shiny and new. He recognized the feeling. He had it himself. The problem with grabbing a tiger by the tail was that letting go could hurt even worse than hanging on.

He picked up a pen and started to write. If Churchill wanted to play along, this wouldn’t cost the limeys much—and if it went off well, it could bring the United States untold grief. That wouldn’t break Jake’s heart. Oh, no—far from it.

His big worry was that Churchill was too obsessed with the Kaiser to care what happened on this side of the Atlantic. But the USA was the country that had taken Canada and Newfoundland away from England after the Great War. Winston was almost as good at remembering offenses done him as Jake was himself.

“Lulu!” he called from his office.

“What is it, Mr. President?” his secretary asked.

“I want Major Hamilton right away.”

Major Ira Hamilton hurried into the President’s underground office inside of five minutes. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said. He was tall, thin, and bespectacled; he looked much more like a math teacher than a major.

“Good. Good.” Jake thrust the paper at him. “I need you to put this into our fanciest code and send it to London just as fast as you can.” There was a reason Hamilton looked like a math teacher: up till the war started, he’d been a professor of mathematics at Washington University.

“I’ll do it, sir,” he said. “It doesn’t look too long—it should go out this afternoon.”

“That’ll be just fine, Major. Thank you kindly.” Featherston was far more polite with people who were useful to him than with the rest of the world. Hamilton gave him a ragged salute and hurried away. Someone would keep a discreet eye on the unmilitary major to make sure he did what he was supposed to do and nothing else. And someone would watch the man who watched Hamilton, and somebody would. . . .

Things had to work that way. If you didn’t keep an eye on people, they’d make you wish you had. Jake even kept an eye on Don Partridge. He’d chosen his Vice President because Partridge was the mildest, safest, most inoffensive, and most useless man he could find—and he kept an eye on him anyway. You couldn’t be too careful.

Some of the papers Featherston plowed through were damage reports from the western part of the Confederacy. The damnyankees were trying to knock out the dams he’d built on the Tennessee and the Cumberland Rivers. That infuriated him. It alarmed him, too. The Confederate States needed the electricity those dams produced. It kept factories going. And it changed millions of people’s lives. He was as proud of those dams and what they did as of almost anything else his administration had accomplished.

Almost
was the key word there. Ferd Koenig came in a couple of hours later. “Good to see you, by God,” Jake said. “Have a seat.” He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of fine Tennessee sipping whiskey. “Have a snort.”