In at the Death (26 page)

You stupid piece of shit. Only way to get me out of this chair is to murder me
. Featherston let a little anger show, but only a little—the sort he might show if he
was
thinking of stepping down. “Do you reckon even the Yankees are dumb enough to take Don Partridge seriously?” he demanded. “I sure as hell don’t.”

“If he’s speaking in the name of the President, or as the President, they’ll have to listen to him.” Nathan Bedford Forrest’s eyes kept slipping toward the door and then jerking back to Jake. The President of the CSA wanted to look that way, too, but he didn’t. He had more discipline in his pinkie than Forrest did in his whole worthless carcass.

“So who all figures the country’d be better off without me?” Jake asked. “Don must be in on this, too, right? How about Clarence Potter? He’s a fellow with pretty fair judgment—always has been.” He was also a fellow Featherston had suspected for years.

To his surprise, Forrest shook his head. “As a matter of fact, no. He thinks you’re the best war leader we’ve got. I used to think so, too, but—”

He broke off. There was a commotion outside, shouts and screams and then a couple of gunshots and more screams and shouts. One of the bullets punched through what was supposed to be bulletproof glass in the door. Almost spent, it ricocheted off the wall above Jake’s head and fell harmlessly to the floor.

An instant later, the door flew open with a crash. Four soldiers in camouflage uniforms burst into the President’s office. Jake and Nathan Bedford Forrest III pointed at each other. “Arrest that man!” they both yelled.

Four automatic-rifle muzzles bore on the chief of the General Staff. So did the .45 Jake Featherston plucked from a desk drawer. “Hold it right there, traitor!” one of the soldiers roared.

“Freedom!” the other three shouted. They were Party Guards, not Army men. Nathan Bedford Forrest III seemed to notice that for the first time. His face turned gray as tobacco smoke. Jake Featherston watched with almost clinical interest. He’d never seen a man go that color before—not a live man, anyhow.

“How—?” Forrest gasped. That used up all the breath he had in him. He might have been a hooked crappie, drowning in air he couldn’t breathe.

“What? You reckon I’ve only got one set of guards round this place?” Jake said. “You might be dumb enough to do something like that, but I sure ain’t.” He turned to the men who’d rescued him. “Make sure everything’s secure down here. You find anybody you don’t figure you can rely on, grab the son of a bitch. We’ll sort out who’s what later on. In the meantime, we squeeze answers out of this asshole. He’ll sing. He’ll sing like a fucking canary.”

“You bet, boss.” One of the Freedom Party Guards—a troop leader—grinned a sharp-toothed grin. “Once we get going, we can make a rock sing.” The three-striper laughed.

So did Featherston. “He won’t be a rock,” he predicted. Part of him wanted to laugh at what an amateurish excuse for a coup Nathan Bedford Forrest III tried to bring off. Talking him into stepping down of his own accord! If that wasn’t the dumbest thing in the world, Jake didn’t know what would be. “Your granddad’d be ashamed of you,” he told Forrest.

“Great-grandfather. And no, he wouldn’t—he didn’t like tyrants any better than I do,” the suddenly former chief of the General Staff replied. He could talk a good game, but some games weren’t about talk, and he’d never figured that out.

“Take him away,” Jake said. He didn’t want to argue with Forrest, and he didn’t have to, either. But the other man hadn’t the least idea what he meant. If the original Nathan Bedford Forrest planned a coup, he would have done it right. This smudgy carbon copy—hardly a Forrest at all in looks, except for the eyes—didn’t know the first thing about how to manage one.

Away he went, perhaps too numb to realize yet what kind of hell he was heading for. Well, he’d find out pretty damn quick. The only thing that excused a plot was winning. Failure brought its own punishment.

Jake went out into the antechamber. Lulu sat at her desk as calmly as if two Army men didn’t lie dead not ten feet away. “I knew you’d take care of that foolishness, Mr. President,” she said. “Shall we call somebody to get rid of this carrion?”

“Mm—not quite yet,” Featherston answered. “Let me bring in some more men I’m sure I can count on.” The worst thing about having somebody mount a coup was being unable to trust the people around you afterwards.

But if he couldn’t count on the Freedom Party Guards, he couldn’t count on anybody—and if he couldn’t count on anybody, Nathan Bedford Forrest III’s strike would have worked like a charm. Jake went back to the telephone on his desk. Had Forrest had the brains to suborn the operator and keep the President from getting hold of loyal troops? That might make things dicey, even now.

But no. Within a minute, Featherston was talking with a regimental commander named Wilcy Hoyt, who promised to secure the Gray House grounds with his troops. “Freedom!” Hoyt said fervently as he rang off.

Would the men who backed Forrest fight? Would they try to take Jake out, reckoning it was their best chance? In their shoes, Featherston would have done that. He still had his .45. But the pistol was there to protect him against a visitor who turned out to be an assassin. It wouldn’t help much against a squad of soldiers determined to do him in.

As soon as he got off the telephone with Hoyt, he went out and grabbed an automatic rifle from one of the dead guards. Even that wouldn’t do him as much good as he wished, but it was better than the pistol. If he had to go down, he aimed to go down fighting.

“Will there be more shooting, Mr. President?” Lulu asked.

“Well, I don’t know for sure, but there may be,” Jake answered.

“Hand me that other rifle, then,” his secretary said.

Featherston stared at her as if she’d suddenly started speaking Swahili. “You know how to use it?”

“Would I ask if I didn’t?” she said.

He gave her the Tredegar. She could handle it, all right. And two rifles blasting anybody who tried to break in were bound to be better than one. “Where the devil did you learn something like this?” Jake inquired.

“A women’s self-defense course,” Lulu answered primly. “I thought I’d be shooting at Yankees, though, not traitors.”

“Rifle works the same either way,” Jake said, and she nodded. He supposed she’d feared assaults on her virtue. His own view was that any damnyankee who tried to take it would have to be desperately horny and plenty nearsighted, too. He would never have said anything like that, though. He liked Lulu, and wouldn’t hurt her for the world—which he wouldn’t have said about most people he knew.

But the people who showed themselves at the doorway to the outer office were Freedom Party Guards: Featherston loyalists. Jake had the first few come in without their weapons and with their hands up. They obeyed. The obvious joy they showed at seeing him alive and in charge of things left him with no doubt that they were on his side.

When they’d set up a perimeter outside the office, he began to feel more nearly certain things were going his way. “Get me another outside line,” he told Lulu. She nodded. Jake snorted in soft contempt. No, Nathan Bedford Forrest hadn’t known thing one about running a coup. Well, too goddamn bad for him. Jake got down to business: “Put me through to Saul Goldman.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” Lulu said, and she did. That the Confederate Director of Communications remained free made Jake snort again. Didn’t Forrest know you couldn’t run a country without propaganda? Evidently he didn’t. He’d left the best liar and rumormonger in the business alone. Had Saul said no, how would Forrest have publicized his strike even if he pulled it off?

No need to flabble about that now. “Saul? This here’s Jake,” Featherston rasped. “Can you record me over the telephone and get me on the air? We’ve had us a little commotion here, but we got it licked now.”

“Hold on for about a minute and a half, sir,” the imperturbable Jew replied. “I need to set up the apparatus, and then you can say whatever you need to.” He took a bit longer than he’d promised, but not much. “Go ahead, Mr. President.”

“Thank you kindly.” Jake paused to gather his thoughts. He didn’t need long, either. “I’m Jake Featherston, and I’m here to tell you the truth. Truth is that a few damn fools reckoned they could do a better job of running our precious country than me. Other truth is that the traitors were wrong, and they’ll pay. Oh, boy, will they ever…”

A
nother new exec. Sam Carsten wondered what he’d get this time. He’d had one pearl of great price and one burr under the saddle. The powers that be might have told him to make do without. He could have done it, but it wouldn’t have been any fun. He would have had to be his own ogre instead of playing the kindly, benevolent Old Man most of the time.

But a new officer had been chosen and brought down to the destroyer escort on a flying boat. And now Lieutenant Lon Menefee bobbed in the light swells of the South Atlantic as a real boat carried him from the seaplane to the
Josephus Daniels
.

“Permission to come aboard, sir?” he called when the boat drew up alongside the warship. By the matter-of-fact way he said it, the
Josephus Daniels
might have been moored in the Boston Navy Yard, not out on her own God only knew how many hundred miles from the nearest land.

“Permission granted,” Sam said, just as formally. A rope ladder tied to the port rail invited Lieutenant Menefee upward. He stood up in the boat, grabbed the ladder, and climbed steadily if not with any enormous agility.

A couple of sailors stood by to grab him as he came over the rail. He turned out not to need them, which made Sam think better of him. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said with a crisp salute.

“Good to have you aboard.” Returning the salute gave Carsten the chance to look him over. He liked what he saw. Menefee was in his late twenties, with a round face, a solid build, and dark whiskers that said he might have to shave twice a day. His eyes were also dark, and showed a wry amusement that would serve him well…if Sam wasn’t just imagining it, of course. Among the fruit salad on his chest was the ribbon for the Purple Heart. Pointing to it, Sam asked, “How’d you pick that up?”

“A Japanese dive bomber hit my destroyer somewhere north of Kauai,” Menefee replied with a shrug. “I got a fragment in the leg. The petty officer next to me got his head blown off, so I was lucky, if you can call getting wounded lucky.”

“All depends on how you look at things,” Sam said. “Next to not getting hurt, getting wounded sucks. But it beats the hell out of getting killed, like you said.”

“Yes, sir.” Lieutenant Menefee cocked his head to one side. “I don’t mean this any way bad at all, sir, but you aren’t what I expected.”

Carsten laughed. “If I had a nickel for every officer who served under me and said the same thing, I’d have…a hell of a lot of nickels, anyway. Who expects to run into a two-striper old enough to be his father?”

“That’s not what I had in mind. Besides, I already knew you were a mustang,” Menefee said. “But you’re not…” He paused, visibly weighing his options. Then he plunged, like a man throwing a double-sawbuck raise into a poker game. “You’re not a hardass, the way I figured you might be.”

He had nerve. He had smarts, too. If that had rubbed Sam the wrong way, it could have blighted things between skipper and exec from then on out. But Menefee had it right—Sam
wasn’t
a hardass, except every once in a while when he needed to be. “I hope not—life’s mostly too short,” he said now. “How come you had me gauged that way?”

“Well, I knew the executive officer you had before didn’t last very long,” Lon Menefee said. “If you’re in my shoes, that makes you wonder.”

“Mm, I can see that it would,” Sam allowed. “Why don’t you come to my cabin? Then we can talk about things without every sailor on the ship swinging his big, flapping hydrophones towards us.”

“Hydrophones, huh?” Menefee’s eyes crinkled at the corners. His mouth didn’t move much, but Sam liked the smile anyway. “Lead on, sir. You know where we’re going.”

“I’ll give you the grand tour in a bit,” Sam said. “Come on.”

After he closed the door to the captain’s little cabin, he pulled a bottle of brandy and a couple of glasses from the steel desk by his bed. “Medicinal, of course,” Lieutenant Menefee observed.

“Well, sure,” Sam said, pouring. “Good for what ails you, whatever the devil it is.” He handed the new exec one of the glasses. “Mud in your eye.” They both drank. The brandy wasn’t the best Sam had ever had—nowhere close. But it was strong, which mattered more. “So you want to hear about the old exec, do you?”

“If I’m going to sail these waters, sir, shouldn’t I know where the mines are?”

“That seems fair enough,” Sam said, and told him the story of Myron Zwilling. He finished, “This is just my side of it, you understand. If you listen to him, I’m sure you’d hear something different.” One corner of his mouth quirked upward. “Yeah, just a little.”

“I’ll bet you one thing, sir,” Menefee said: “
He
wouldn’t figure the story had two sides. He’d tell me his was the only one, and he’d get mad if I tried to tell him anything different.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Sam said. Zwilling hadn’t had any doubts. Sure as hell, that was part of his problem. “Do
you
see things in black and white, or are there shades of gray for you?”

“I hope there’s gray,” Menefee said. “Black and white make things easier, but only if you don’t want to think.”

That sounded like the right answer. But did he mean it, or was he saying what he thought his new skipper wanted to hear?
I’ll find out
, Sam thought. Aloud, he said, “Things aboard ship are pretty much cut-and-dried right now. They’ll stay that way, too, I hope, unless we need to pick another prize crew.”

“I’ll be all right with that,” Menefee said. “I just got here, so I don’t know who doesn’t like me and who really can’t stand me. Those are about the only choices an exec has, aren’t they?”

“Pretty much,” Sam said. “Is this your first time in the duty?”

“Yes, sir,” the younger man replied. By the way he said it, a second term as executive officer wouldn’t be far removed from a second conviction for theft. Maybe he wasn’t so wrong, either. Didn’t a second term as exec say you didn’t deserve a command of your own?