In at the Death (14 page)

“Our calculations show it would start going off too soon and get too deformed for a full blast,” the physicist answered.

“Well, you seem to think you
can
make it go off,” Potter said, and Henderson FitzBelmont nodded. Potter asked what looked like the next reasonable question: “How?”

“We have to slam a lot of pieces down into a sphere—that’s what the math says,” FitzBelmont replied. “It’s harder than making a U-235 bomb would be, because it’s so much more precise. But getting the jovium is easier, because we can chemically separate it from the uranium in the pile.”

“My chemistry prof at Yale told me transmutation was nothing but a pipe dream,” Potter said.

“Mine told me the same thing.” FitzBelmont shrugged. “Sometimes the rules change. They did here. Transmutation isn’t chemistry—it’s physics.”

“It could be black magic, and I wouldn’t care,” Potter said. “As long as we say, ‘Abracadabra!’ before the damnyankees do, nothing else counts.”

“They’re doing their best to make sure we don’t. Are we doing the same to them?” the professor asked.

“What we can. Getting to Washington State isn’t easy for us, and it got tougher after they went and grabbed Baja California from Mexico,” Potter said. Henderson FitzBelmont looked blank. He was no military man. Patiently, Potter explained: “It makes it much harder for us to get ships and subs out of Guaymas. But we did it not so long ago, and we attacked their facility.”

“And?” FitzBelmont asked eagerly.

“And past that I don’t know,” Potter admitted. “The attack went in—that’s all I can tell you for sure. The United States keep real quiet about their project, same as we keep quiet about ours. We haven’t picked up any leaks to let us know what we did—none I’ve heard, anyhow.”

“We can’t hit them the way they hit us,” FitzBelmont said mournfully. “And it looks like they started work on this before we did.”

Potter had been worrying about those very things for quite a while now. Except for getting the latest strike at the Yankee project started, he couldn’t do much but worry. “That means we have to be smarter,” he told the physicist. “We’re up to that, aren’t we? If we make fewer mistakes and don’t get stuck in blind alleys, we can still win. You’re as good as anybody they’ve got, right?”
You’d better be, or we’re history
.

“Yes, I think so,” FitzBelmont replied. “They may well have more highly competent people than we do, though. And I worry about Germany a good deal. The Kaiser’s physicists, and the ones he can draw from Austria-Hungary, are the best in the world. Has the President been able to get any technical help from
our
allies?”

“If he has, he hasn’t told me,” Potter said. “I’ll ask him next time I’m in Richmond.”

That was only a couple of days later. Traveling inside Richmond was safer by day. U.S. airplanes mostly came at night. Confederate defenses and fighters still made daytime raids too costly to be common. The bombers had taken a terrible toll all the same. Intact buildings stood out because they were so rare. The streets were full of holes of all sizes. The smell of death floated through the air.

The grounds to the Gray House might have been hit harder than anything else in Richmond. The United States wanted Jake Featherston dead. They wanted to avenge Al Smith, and they thought the Confederacy would grind to a halt without its leader. Potter feared they were right, too, which made him leery of plots against Featherston.

After going underground, after a couple of unpleasantly thorough searches, he was escorted to the waiting room outside the President’s office, and then into Featherston’s presence. The President’s secretary sniffed as she closed the door behind him.

“Lulu doesn’t much fancy you.” Jake Featherston sounded amused, which was a relief. “She doesn’t reckon you think I’m wonderful enough.”

How right she is
. But saying that was impolitic. “The country needs you. I know it.” Potter could tell the truth without giving away his own feelings.

“What’s the latest from Lexington?” Featherston asked, letting Lulu go.

“They’re doing everything they know how to do, and the United States are trying to make sure they can’t,” Potter answered. “Do you know what we did in Washington State?”

“Something,” the President answered. “They’ve had repair crews in there—I know that for a fact. Don’t know much more, though.”

How did he know even that much? A spy on the spot? Reconnaissance aircraft? Intercepted signals? Whatever the answer was, the word hadn’t come through Potter. “How are things in Georgia?” he asked. The wireless didn’t say much, which was never a good sign.

“We’re going to lose Atlanta,” Featherston said bluntly. “They didn’t want to come in, so they’re sweeping around. They want to trap our army in there and grind it to pieces.”

“For God’s sake don’t let them!” Potter exclaimed. The President had thrown away one army in Pittsburgh. Didn’t he see he couldn’t afford to do that again?

He must have, for he nodded. “We’re pulling out. We’re wrecking the place, too. They won’t get any use from it when they get in.” He paused. “When Patton challenged you to a duel, did you really choose flamethrowers?”

“Yes, sir,” Potter answered. “For a little while, I thought he’d take me up on it, too.”

“That wouldn’t’ve been pretty, would it?” the President said. Potter shook his head; it would have been anything but. Featherston went on, “He was spitting rivets at you, though. Let me tell you, he was.”

“Let him spit rivets at the damnyankees,” Clarence Potter said. “It would hurt ’em a lot more than some of the other things he’s tried.”

“Yeah, I know.” Featherston scowled. “But who have I got who’d do better?”

Potter grunted. That, unfortunately, was much too good a question. He found a question of his own: “If we can’t lick the USA no matter who we’ve got in the field, why are we still fighting?”

“Well, for one thing, they want unconditional surrender, and I’ll see ’em in hell first,” Jake Featherston answered. “And, for another, the longer we hold on, the better the chance FitzBelmont and the other slide-rule boys have of blowing ’em a new asshole.”

Reluctantly, Potter nodded. The Confederate States had shown they were too dangerous for the United States to give them another chance to rebuild and try again. It was a compliment of sorts, but one the Confederacy could have done without now. As for the other…“What if they get a uranium bomb first?”

“Then we’re fucked.” Featherston’s response had, at least, the virtue of clarity. “Then we don’t deserve to win. But that won’t happen, so help me God it won’t. We are going to lick those bastards right out of their boots. You wait and see.”

When he said it, Potter just about believed it—a telling measure of how persuasive Featherston could be. But afterwards, coming up aboveground once more, seeing the devastation that had been a great city, Potter shivered. How often lately had Jake Featherston taken a good long look at what had become of his capital and his country?

That afternoon, Potter and Nathan Bedford Forrest III walked through the disaster that was Capitol Square. Washington’s statue still survived; not even a mountain of sandbags had saved Albert Sidney Johnston’s. “What the hell are we going to do?” the chief of the General Staff said—quietly, so no passerby could hear.

“What the hell
can
we do?” Potter answered. “We’re stuck between the Yankees and Jake Featherston. If we dump Featherston—if we kill him, I mean, because he won’t be dumped—the United States land on us with both feet. And if we keep fighting—”

“The United States land on us with both feet anyhow,” Forrest finished bitterly.

“They won’t let us quit,” Potter said. “They aim to wipe us off the map, same as they did in the War of Secession.”

“Featherston never should have started this damn war,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said.

“Oh, cut the crap…sir,” Potter said. His superior gaped. Not caring, he went on, “You aren’t mad at him for starting the war. You were all for it. So was I. So was everybody. You’re just mad because we aren’t winning.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Sure, but at least I know why. I—” Clarence Potter broke off.

“What?” Forrest said, but then he heard it, too: the distant rumble of artillery suddenly picking up. He frowned. His eyes, which were more like his famous great-grandfather’s than any other feature, narrowed. “Damnyankees haven’t done that much firing for quite a while.”

“They sure haven’t,” Potter agreed. “I wonder if they think they can catch us with our pants down here because we’ve moved so much stuff to Georgia.”
I wonder if they’re right
. He didn’t say that out loud. Nathan Bedford Forrest III had enough to worry about, and the same thought was bound to be going through his mind.

The chief of the General Staff stood there listening, his head cocked to one side. After a minute or so, he shook himself; he might almost have come out of a trance. “I’d better get back to the War Department, find out what the hell they’re up to,” he said.

“I’ll come with you,” Potter said. Forrest didn’t tell him no, even though he didn’t have a formal place there any more. The gunfire went on and on. Halfway back to the War Department building, both men broke into a trot.

C
assius and Gracchus strode through the streets of Madison, Georgia. They both wore U.S. Army boots on their feet and green-gray U.S. military-issue trousers. Only their collarless chambray work shirts said they weren’t regular U.S. soldiers—those and their black skins, of course. Even the shirts had Stars-and-Stripes armbands on the left sleeve. The Negroes were at least semiofficial.

Gracchus carried a captured C.S. submachine gun; Cassius still had his bolt-action Tredegar. Both of them were alert for anything that looked like trouble. Madison had only recently fallen to the United States. The whites here didn’t like seeing their own soldiers driven away. They were even less happy about Negroes patrolling their streets.

A couple of days earlier, somebody’d fired at one of Gracchus’ men. The guerrilla got his left hand torn up. Madison got a lesson, a painful one. The U.S. commandant, a cold-eyed captain named Lester Wallace, grabbed the first ten white men he could catch, lined them up against a brick wall, and had them shot without even blindfolding them first.

“Nobody fucks with anybody under U.S. authority in this town,” he told the horrified locals in a voice like iron, while the bodies still lay there bleeding. “Nobody, you hear?”

“Jesus God, it was only a nigger!” a woman shrilled.

“Anybody who comes out with that kind of shit from now on, I figure you just volunteered for hostage duty,” Wallace said. “Far as I can see, the black folks around here are worth at least ten of you assholes apiece—I mean at
least
. They didn’t start murdering people for the fun of it. You ‘Freedom!’-yelling cocksuckers did.”

“We didn’t know what happened to the colored folks who got shipped out,” an old man quavered.

“Yeah—now tell me another one. You give me horseshit like that, you’re a volunteer hostage, too,” Captain Wallace said. “You didn’t know! Where’d you
think
they were going, you goddamn lying bucket of puke? To a fucking football game?”

Cassius didn’t know what he’d thought Yankees would be like. This chilly ferocity wasn’t it, though—he was sure of that. A lot of U.S. soldiers hated the enemy with a clear and simple passion that shoved everything else to one side.

“You know, I never had much use for smokes,” a skinny corporal who needed a shave told Cassius out of the blue one day. “But shit, man, if Featherston’s fuckers have it in for you, you gotta have somethin’ going for you.”

Was that logical? Cassius wondered what his father would have thought of it. But there was a brutal logic that beat down the more formal sort.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend
. That was working here.

It had a flip side.
The friend of my enemy is my enemy
. As Cassius and Gracchus patrolled Madison, Cassius said, “Ain’t never gonna be safe for niggers around here without Yankees close by from now on.”

“Reckon not,” Gracchus said, “but how safe was it for us ’fore the damnyankees done got here?”

That question answered itself. His family hauled out of church and taken off to a camp. His own life on the run ever since. The precarious life black guerrillas led, knowing there would be no mercy if they got caught.

“Well, you got me,” Cassius said.

They tramped into the town square. A bronze plaque was affixed to a small stone pillar there. Somehow, the little monument had come through the fighting that leveled half the town without even a nick. Gracchus pointed to the plaque. “What’s it say?” he asked. Cassius had taught him his letters, but he still didn’t read well.

“Says it’s the Braswell Monument,” Cassius said. “Says in 1817 Benjamin Braswell done sold thirteen slaves after he was dead so they could use the money to educate white chillun. Says they raised almos’ thirty-six hundred dollars. Ain’t that grand?”

“Sold niggers to help ofays. That’s how it goes, sure as hell.” Gracchus strode up to the Braswell Monument, unbuttoned his fly, and took a long leak. “Show what I thinks o’ you, Mr. Benjamin fuckin’ Asswell.”

A couple of white women with wheeled wire shopping carts were hurrying across the square. They took one look Gracchus’ way and walked even faster. “They don’t like your dark meat,” Cassius said.

“My meat don’t like them, neither,” Gracchus replied. “I start fuckin’ white women, I ain’t gonna start fuckin’ no ugly white women, an’ they was dogs.”

They hadn’t been beautiful. Some Negroes in U.S. service didn’t care. They took their revenge on Confederate women for everything Confederate men had done to them. A few U.S. officers reacted as badly to that as Confederate men might have. Not everyone in the USA loved Negroes, not by a long shot. But most men who wore green-gray uniforms hated the enemy worse than the blacks he’d oppressed.

“Know what I feel like?” Gracchus said as he and Cassius resumed their patrol. “I feel like a dog that jus’ pissed somewhere to say, ‘This here place mine.’”