In at the Death (38 page)

But if Virginia returned to the USA…well, what then? If all these states that had been their own nation for eighty-odd years returned to the one from which they’d seceded, wouldn’t they spend years trying to break away again? Wouldn’t there be guerrillas in the mountains and the woods? Wouldn’t there be people bombs in the cities? Wouldn’t the locals send Freedom Party bastards to Congress, the way Kentucky and Houston had between the wars?

“Winning this goddamn war will be almost as bad as losing it would have been,” Dowling said in a voice not far from despair.

“That crossed my mind, too, sir,” his adjutant said. “How many of these sons of bitches will we have to kill?”

“As many as it takes,” Dowling answered. “If we don’t kill any more than that just for the fun of it, our hands are…pretty clean, anyway.”

He had to look around to orient himself. The United States had knocked most of Richmond flat, while the Confederate defenders had flattened much of the rest. They’d fought hard. They never seemed to fight any other way. But there hadn’t been enough of them to keep U.S. soldiers from breaking in.

Jefferson Davis. Robert E. Lee. Stonewall Jackson. Old Pete Longstreet. Woodrow Wilson. The famous Confederates of ages past had to be spinning in their graves—unless U.S. bombs had already evicted them. A pity Jake Featherston wasn’t spinning in his. Well, the time for that was coming.

“You know, sir, in a way they’re lucky here,” Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli said.

“Oh, yeah? How’s that?” Dowling asked.

“It’s like I said before—if they’d kept fighting a little longer, they
would
have had a uranium bomb come down on their heads. Then they’d think what’s left here was paradise by comparison.”

“Well, you’re bound to be right about that,” Dowling said. “Except most of them wouldn’t be doing any thinking—”

“Like they do anyway,” his adjutant put in.

That stopped him, but only for a second. “Because they’d be dead,” he finished. A lot of them already were. The stench in the air left no doubt of that.

Stench or no stench, though, he’d done something a lot of the most important people in U.S. history never managed. He’d remembered long-gone Confederate dignitaries before. Now Lincoln and McClellan, James G. Blaine and John Pope, and Teddy Roosevelt and George Custer sprang to mind. Not a one of them had ever set foot in Richmond.
But here I am, by God!
Dowling thought proudly.

“General! Hey, General Dowling, sir!” somebody behind him yelled. “Guess what, sir!”

“That doesn’t sound so good,” Angelo Toricelli said.

“No, it doesn’t.” Slowly, ponderously, Dowling turned. “I’m here. What is it?”

“Guess what?” the soldier said again, but then he told what: “We just found a whole family of nig—uh, Negroes, all safe and sound.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Dowling said. A few blacks had come out of hiding when U.S. soldiers entered Richmond, but not many. After the uprising here, Jake Featherston’s goons had been uncommonly thorough. Every surviving Negro seemed a separate surprise. “Who are they? How did they make it?”

“They were servants to some rich guy before the war,” the soldier answered. “Carter, I think his name was, from the Tarkas estate. Or maybe I’ve got it backwards—dunno for sure, sir. But anyway, he and his people have been hiding them ever since colored folks started having trouble here.”

“How about that?” Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli said. “Just when you think they’re all assholes, somebody goes and does something decent and fools you.”

“They’re human beings,” Dowling said. “They aren’t always the human beings we wish they were, but they’re human beings.” He raised his voice to call to the soldier: “Send this Carter fellow to my headquarters. I’d like to talk to him.”

“Will do, sir,” the man replied.

Dowling’s headquarters were in a tent in Capitol Square, not far from the remains of the statue of Albert Sidney Johnston. George Washington’s statue, smothered in sandbags, still stood nearby. He got back there just before Jack Carter arrived. The Virginian was tall and trim and handsome, with gray eyes, black hair, and weathered features; he looked to be some age between thirty-five and sixty. “Welcome,” Dowling told him. “I’d like to shake your hand.”

Carter looked at him—looked through him, really. “I’m sorry, General, but I don’t care to shake yours.”

This wasn’t going to go the way Abner Dowling had thought it would. Whatever Carter was, he wasn’t the U.S. liberal somehow fallen into the CSA Dowling had thought him to be. “Maybe you’ll explain why,” the U.S. soldier said.

“Of course, sir. I’d be glad to,” Jack Carter replied. “My chiefest reason is that I am a Confederate patriot. I wish you were hundreds of miles from here, suing for peace from victorious Confederate armies.”

“That’s nice,” Dowling said. “Jake Featherston wishes the same thing. He won’t get his wish, and you won’t get yours. Santa Claus doesn’t have those in his sack.”

“Jake Featherston. Do me the courtesy, if you please, of not mentioning that name in my presence again.” Carter’s loathing might have been the most genteel Dowling had ever met, which made it no less real.

“Sorry about that. He’s still President of the Confederate States.”

“He’s an upstart, a backwoods bumpkin. His father was an overseer.” Jack Carter’s lip curled. That was one of those things people talked about but hardly ever saw. Dowling saw it now. Carter went on, “My family has mattered in this state since before the Revolution.”

A light went on in Dowling’s head. “
That’s
why you saved your Negroes!”

“Yes, of course. They’ve served us for as long as we’ve served Virginia. To lose them to the vulgar excesses of that demagogue and his faction…” Carter shook his head. “No.”

“
Noblesse oblige
,” Dowling murmured.

“Mock me if you care to. We did what we thought right for them.”

Dowling wasn’t sure whether he was mocking or not. Without a doubt, Carter had risked his own life and his family’s to protect those of his servants. That almost required admiration. And yet…“Did you do anything for other colored people, Mr. Carter?”

“That was not my place,” Carter said simply. “But you’ll find I was not the only one to take the measures I thought necessary.”

He was bound to be right. Some other whites had hidden Negroes and helped them escape the Freedom Party’s population reductions. Some had, yes, but not very many. “Maybe you’d better go,” Dowling said.

Jack Carter took a step back. “You thought we might be friends because of what I did. I assure you, sir, I am more sincerely your enemy than Jake Featherston ever dreamt of being. Good day.” He bowed, then stalked out.

He might be a more sincere enemy, but Jake Featherston made a more dangerous one. Carter was content to abhor from a distance. Featherston wasn’t. He wanted to kill what he didn’t like, and he was much too good at it.

A sergeant with the wireless patch on his left sleeve burst into the tent. “Paris, sir!” he exclaimed.

“Paris?” Dowling’s first thought, absurdly, was of Helen of Troy.

The sergeant set him straight: “Yes, sir! Paris! The Kaiser just blew it to hell and gone. Eiffel Tower’s nothing but a stump, the report says!”

“Jesus Christ!” Dowling said, and then, “Will anything still be standing by the time this damn war gets done?”

N
obody messed with Lavochkin’s Looters as they fought their way up the South Carolina coast toward Charleston. Nobody shot at them from ambush. Nobody gave them any guff when they went through a town. Confederate soldiers who surrendered to them seemed pathetically grateful to have the chance.

“You see?” Lieutenant Boris Lavochkin said. “You
can
put the fear of God in these assholes. You can, and we did.”

Chester Martin didn’t answer that. He pretended he didn’t hear it. He wished he could pretend he’d had nothing to do with the massacre in Hardeeville. But he had. He was no damn good at lying to himself. Even if he were, the nightmares that tore apart even his exhausted sleep would have made him stop trying.

He wasn’t the only one who had them. Several guys in Lavochkin’s platoon were jumpier than a cat at a Great Dane convention. Some replacements knew what was going on as soon as they came in. “Aren’t you the guys who—?” they would say, and stop right there.

Others, more naïve or less plugged in, tried to figure out what was going on. They usually said something on the order of, “How come you guys are so weird?”

If anything bothered Lieutenant Lavochkin, he didn’t show it. If anything, he was proud of what had happened in Hardeeville. “Nobody fucks with my outfit,” he would tell anyone who wanted to listen. “I mean nobody. You fuck with us, tell the carver what you want on your goddamn headstone, ’cause you are all over with.”

Captain Rhodes kept shaking his head. “I never expected anything like this to happen to me,” he said one evening. He and Chester had got outside of some pretty good cherry brandy a Confederate had left behind. Booze blunted nightmares.

“War’s a filthy business,” Chester said. “God knows I saw that the last time around. I think the trenches were even worse than what we’re doing now. For fighting in, I mean.”

“Yeah, for fighting in,” the company CO agreed. Or rather, half agreed, for he went on, “But what happened in Hardeeville, that wasn’t fighting. That was just…murder for the fun of it. And what the Confederates are doing in those goddamn camps, that isn’t fighting, either. That’s murder for the fun of it, too, ’cause the smokes can’t fight back. This war’s filthier than the last one was. The horrible stuff then just kinda happened, ’cause they couldn’t help it. This time, they’re making it horrible on purpose.”

He knew about the last war from what he’d read and what people told him. He wasn’t anywhere near old enough to have fought in it. “You have a point, sir,” Chester said. “Some of a point, anyway.” Disagreeing too openly with a superior didn’t do. But he damn well
had
been through the Great War. “What about the guys who started using gas? You think they weren’t being horrible on purpose?”

“Well, you got me there,” Rhodes admitted. Chester liked shooting the bull with him not least because he would admit somebody else had a point. He didn’t have anything close to Boris Lavochkin’s messianic confidence in his own rightness…and righteousness. What was Lieutenant Lavochkin but a scale model of Jake Featherston?

Featherston had flushed a whole country down the toilet. Lavochkin had only a platoon to play with—so far. But Chester was part of the platoon. If the lieutenant threw it away, the first sergeant went with it.

He didn’t want to think about that, so he took another swig. Yeah, cherry brandy made a good thought preventer. The bottle was damn near empty. He passed it to Captain Rhodes, who put the kibosh on
damn near
.

“Charleston up ahead,” Chester said. “Won’t be long now.”

“One more city,” Rhodes said.

“Oh, it’s more than that.” Chester knew he sounded shocked. But Rhodes would have gone to school in the lull of the 1920s. Back then, nobody thought you needed to remind anybody of just how and why the USA and CSA got to be mortal foes. They would stay peaceful and live happily ever after. And if pigs had wings…

Chester remembered his own school days, before the Great War. They pounded you over the head with the War of Secession then. They kept saying that one day the USA would pay the CSA back. And the United States did. And then the Confederate States had some backpaying to do.
And that’s how come I’m sitting on my ass somewhere south of Charleston
, Chester thought.

“I wouldn’t mind marching through there,” he said. “Give them one in the eye for Fort Sumter, you know?”

“Well, yeah,” Rhodes said. But it didn’t mean so much to him. Martin could tell. He didn’t have that
This is where it all began, and we’ll damn well end it here, too
kind of feeling. Maybe Lieutenant Lavochkin would. Or maybe he hated the whole Confederacy equally. All things considered, Chester didn’t want to ask him.

He woke with a headache the next morning. Strong coffee and a couple of aspirins helped. Incoming artillery, on the other hand…Even now, the Confederates counterattacked whenever they thought they could drive their foes back a couple of miles. A U.S. machine gun opened up no more than twenty yards from Chester. His head didn’t explode, which only proved he was tougher than he thought.

Then he had to do some shooting of his own, and that was even worse. A lot of the Confederates didn’t hit the dirt as fast as they should have.
New men
, Chester thought with an abstract sympathy that didn’t keep him from killing them as fast as he could. They would have done the same to him if they could. But they’d got thrown into the fight too soon to know what they were doing, and a lot of them would never have the chance to learn now.

U.S. armor rattled up to put the final quietus on the Confederate attack. A couple of barrels had Negroes riding on them. The blacks had probably shown the barrel crews shortcuts through the coastal swamps. One of them gleefully blazed away at the men in butternut with a submachine gun. The cannons’ bellow made Chester dry-swallow three more aspirins.

The barrels pushed past the U.S. foot soldiers and went after the Confederates. “Come on!” Lieutenant Lavochkin yelled. “Follow me! We don’t leave them to do the work by themselves.” He jumped out of his hole and loped along with the green-gray machines.

No matter what Chester thought about him, he was dead right there. Armor and infantry worked better as a team than either one did by itself. “Come on, guys!” Chester scrambled from his foxhole—he wasn’t limber enough to leap the way the lieutenant did. “Let’s go get those bastards!”

Some Confederates stayed stubborn to the end, took a few Yankees with them, and died. Some gave up as soon as they could. Most of those lived; killing in cold blood a poor, scared kid who only wanted to quit didn’t come easy. The ones who hesitated were lost.

A youngster with a face full of zits and enormous gray eyes full of terror threw down his submachine gun and raised his hands high over his head. “Don’t shoot me, Mr. Damnyankee!” he blubbered to Chester. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen. “I give up!”