In at the Death (45 page)

T
hings were quiet outside of Birmingham, and inside, too. Cincinnatus Driver approved of that. After all the shells that had flown back and forth, a truce was holding now. A U.S. officer had gone into Birmingham to confer with C.S. General Patton.

None of the drivers, of course, knew what the U.S. officer would tell the surrounded general. That didn’t stop them from guessing. “If he don’t quit, I bet we drop a superbomb on him,” Cincinnatus said.

“Sounds good to me,” Hal Williamson said. Several other men nodded. Williamson went on, “All the trouble Patton’s caused, we ought to drop a bomb on the fucker anyway.”

More nods, Cincinnatus’ among them. “I wonder when he’ll come out,” the Negro said. The officer, a major, had gone in not far from their encampment. If he came out the same way, maybe he would tell them what was what. You could hope so, anyway.

“How long d’you think he’ll give Patton?” somebody asked.

“I wouldn’t give him long,” Williamson said. “If it’s surrender or get one of those bombs in the kisser, what does he need to figure out?”

Cincinnatus lit a cigarette. Not even tobacco smoke soothed him much. He wanted to know what was going on there inside the battered heart of the Confederate industrial town.

So did the other drivers. “That Patton’s a stubborn bastard,” one of them said. “What if he doesn’t give in?”

“His funeral, in that case,” Cincinnatus said, and then, “Couldn’t happen to a nicer fella…. Well, it could happen to Jake Featherston, but I reckon that’s comin’, too.”

Williamson pointed into the ruin that was Birmingham. “Here comes our guy,” he said. “And look! He’s got one of those butternut bastards with him.”

Sure enough, two men came out of the city, each of them carrying a large flag of truce. The C.S. officer looked clean and neat despite the disaster that had befallen the place he was defending. He also looked as unhappy as if he were burying his only son. That told Cincinnatus most of what he needed to know.

“They givin’ up, suh?” he called to the U.S. officer, the rising lilt in his voice saying he already had a good notion of the answer.

All the drivers burst into cheers when the major nodded. “They sure are,” he answered, “or it looks that way, anyhow. We’ve still got a few little things to iron out—that’s why Captain Monroe is with me.”

The Confederate started to give the men standing near the big green-gray trucks a polite nod. Then he saw Cincinnatus among them. “You have those damned black terrorists here?” he demanded of the officer in green-gray.

“I ain’t a guerrilla.” Cincinnatus spoke for himself. “I don’t blame those folks for risin’ up—don’t get me wrong—but I ain’t one of them. I’m a citizen of the USA, and proud of it, too.”

“That’s telling him!” Hal Williamson said.

Captain Monroe looked even more mournful than he had before. The U.S. major, whose name Cincinnatus still didn’t know, grinned from ear to ear. “You asked, Captain,” he said. “Now you know.”

“It’s still wrong,” Monroe said stubbornly. “Niggers got no business fighting.”

“You call me nigger again, you ofay asshole, you ain’t gonna last to dicker your goddamn surrender,” Cincinnatus said. Captain Monroe’s jaw dropped all the way to his chest. He couldn’t have been more astonished if an Army mule had cussed him out.

“Somebody doesn’t seem to agree with you,” the U.S. major observed. “And since he’s here, maybe he’s got a point, you know?”

Monroe shook his head. Cincinnatus hadn’t expected anything different. Speaking of Army mules…When it came to the Confederates’ views of Negroes, they could have given the beasts mulishness lessons.

As the two officers went back to confer with U.S. higher-ups, Hal Williamson thumped Cincinnatus on the back. “That butternut bastard can’t make nasty cracks about you!”

“He better not,” Cincinnatus said. “The guys who can talk are the guys who end up winnin’. You lose, you got to listen to the fellas on the other side doin’ the braggin’.”

“That’s us!” Two drivers said it at the same time. Cincinnatus nodded.

After that, with the ceasefire holding, the drivers had nothing to do but sit around and smoke and eat and play cards. Cincinnatus didn’t mind, not even a little. Nothing could go wrong while he was in the middle of a big U.S. army. Nobody was likely to shoot at him from ambush. His truck wouldn’t hit a mine and explode in flames. And they gave him the same combat bonus for this as they did for driving through bushwhacker country.

Three hours later, the U.S. major and C.S. Captain Monroe returned, both of them with their white flags. The officer in green-gray was all smiles, while Monroe, his shoulders slumped, his head bowed, showed nothing but gloom.

“It’s all over,” the U.S. major said. “They’ll come out. One more nail in the coffin, and a big one, too.”

“Did you have to say that?” Monroe barked.

“I’m sorry, Captain, but will you tell me it’s not the truth?” the major asked. The Confederate officer didn’t answer, which in itself told everything that needed telling. The major nodded to the group of truck drivers. “We gave them one thing: Patton gets to address his men after they lay down their arms.”

“Why not?” Cincinnatus said. “Talk is cheap.” His pals laughed. The U.S. major didn’t, but mostly, Cincinnatus judged, to keep from offending his C.S. counterpart. As for Captain Monroe, his glare said Cincinnatus belonged in a camp even if he was a U.S. citizen. Cincinnatus scowled back, remembering how close he’d come to ending up in one. How many other Negroes from Covington’s barbed-wire-enclosed colored district were still alive? Any? He just didn’t know.

The two officers went back into Birmingham. Cincinnatus listened to shouts, some of them amplified, inside the city.
Spreading the word
, he judged. After another hour or so, Confederate soldiers started coming out. They weren’t carrying weapons, and they held their hands above their heads. A few had bits of white rag tied to sticks. They were skinny, and their uniforms had seen a lot of wear, but, like Captain Monroe, they all looked surprisingly well bathed and well groomed. Patton was supposed to be a stickler for stuff like that.

They weren’t shy about scrounging ration tins from anybody in green-gray they saw. “Thanks, pal,” one of them said when Cincinnatus tossed him a can. Then the man did a double take at his dark skin. He looked at the can. “Yeah, thanks,” he repeated, and went on.

“Wow,” Hal Williamson said. “This place made half the shit they threw at us, seems like. And now it’s out of business.” He mimed swiping the back of his hand over his forehead in relief.

“So where do we drop the superbomb we were gonna put here?” another driver asked.

“New Orleans. Gotta be New Orleans.” The answer came to Cincinnatus as soon as he heard the question. “Satchmo won’t like it, but too bad for him.”

“No offense, Cincinnatus, but I don’t much care for the music he plays,” Hal said.

Cincinnatus shrugged. “Well, I can see that, ’cause it ain’t what you’re used to. Me, I grew up in the CSA, so it sounds right to me. And he’s damn good at what he does, whether you like it or not.”

“So is Jake Featherston,” Williamson said, which was true but not exactly a compliment. Cincinnatus thought about rising to it and arguing for real, but why? When a whole Confederate army was surrendering, what point to a dumb little quarrel?

More and more soldiers in butternut and Freedom Party Guards in camouflage uniforms trudged out of Birmingham. The Party guards looked even sorrier about giving up than the Army men did. Had they seen any chance to fight on, they would have grabbed it. But they didn’t—even they knew the jig was up.

Hall nudged Cincinnatus. “Look! That’s Patton! That has to be Patton.”

“Sure does,” Cincinnatus said. Nobody else would have worn a chromed helmet with wreathed stars picked out in gold. Nobody else would have worn not one but two fancy six-shooters, either. Patton’s look of loathing made everything from the other soldiers and the Freedom Party Guards seem downright benign by comparison.

Patton already had U.S. soldiers walking along watching him as if he were a lion in a zoo—a dangerous beast that couldn’t hurt anybody any more. Cincinnatus and the rest of the drivers fell in with them.

The Confederate soldiers—now the Confederate POWs—stood in rough ranks in a battered, cratered field. U.S. troops, many armed with captured automatic weapons, guarded them. More U.S. soldiers rubbernecked like Cincinnatus. Engineers had set up a microphone in front of the prisoners. The U.S. commander was a long-faced, bald brigadier general named Ironhewer; he waited by the mike for Patton’s approach.

Patton saluted him with immense dignity. General Ironhewer returned the military courtesy. Patton took off his pistols and handed them, still holstered, to Ironhewer. This time, the U.S. general saluted him first. He gave the ceremonial weapons to an aide, then went up to the microphone.

“Men of the Army of Kentucky,” he said in Midwestern accents, “General Patton has asked leave to speak to you one last time. As this battle ends, as peace between our two countries draws near, I did not see how I could refuse him this privilege.” He nodded to the C.S. commander. “General Patton.”

Ironhewer stepped away from the microphone and Patton took his place. “Thank you, General, for the courtesy you have shown me and the kindness you are showing my men,” he said, his voice thick with unshed tears. He needed a moment to gather himself before continuing. “Soldiers, by an agreement between General Ironhewer and me, the troops of the Army of Kentucky have surrendered. That we are beaten is a self-evident fact, and we cannot hope to resist the bomb that hangs over our head like the sword of Damocles. Richmond is fallen. The cause for which you have so long and manfully struggled, and for which you have braved dangers and made so many sacrifices, is today hopeless.

“Reason dictates and humanity demands that no more blood be shed here. It is your sad duty, and mine, to lay down our arms and to aid in restoring peace. As your commander, I sincerely hope that every officer and soldier will carry out in good faith all the terms of the surrender.

“War such as you have passed through naturally engenders feelings of animosity, hatred, and revenge. But in captivity and when you return home a manly, straightforward course of conduct will secure the respect even of your enemies.” Patton paused. He brushed a hand to his eyes, then went on. “In bidding you farewell, rest assured that you carry with you my best wishes for your future welfare and happiness. I have never sent you where I was unwilling to go myself, nor would I now advise you to a course I felt myself unwilling to pursue. You have been good soldiers. Preserve your honor, and the government to which you have surrendered can afford to be and, I hope, will be magnanimous.”

Still very erect, he saluted his men. Some of them cried out his name. Others let loose with what they still called the Rebel yell. Tears now streaming down his face, Patton waited for the tumult to die down a little. Then he stepped into the ragged ranks of the rest of the POWs.

Defeated Confederate soldiers shook his hand and embraced him. Cincinnatus watched them with a little sympathy—but not much. “We done licked ’em here,” he said to Hal Williamson. “Now we got to finish it everywhere else.”

XII

D
id
taking your own airplanes with you mean a flotilla could operate close to enemy-held land? It hadn’t at the start of the war, as Sam Carsten remembered too well. Land-based C.S. airplanes badly damaged the
Remembrance
when her bombers struck at Charleston.

Well, all kinds of things had changed since then. Charleston was no more—one bomb from a (land-based) airplane had seen to that. And the fleet approaching Haiti had not one airplane carrier but half a dozen. Only one of those was a fleet carrier, newer and faster and able to carry more airplanes than the
Remembrance
had. The others were smaller, and three of them slower. Still, together they carried close to three hundred airplanes. If that thought wasn’t enough to give the Confederate defenders on the western part of the island of Hispaniola nightmares, Sam didn’t know what would be.

He had a few nightmares of his own. The Confederates still had airplanes on Haiti, in the Bahamas, and in Cuba. They had submersibles and torpedo boats. They had a sizable garrison to hold Haiti down and to keep the USA from using the Negro nation as a base against them in the Caribbean. They had…

“Sir, they have troubles, lots of them,” Lon Menefee said when Sam flabbled out loud. “All those colored folks on these islands hate Jake Featherston like rat poison. Why, Cuba—”

“I know about Cuba,” Sam broke in. “The
Josephus Daniels
ran guns in there a couple of years ago, to give the rebels a hand.”

“Well, there you go, then.” The new exec damn near dripped confidence. “Besides, they may have airplanes, but have they got fuel? We’ve been pounding their dumps and hitting the shipping from the mainland. We can do this. I honest to God think we can, sir.”

“Hey, here’s hoping you’re right,” Carsten said. It wasn’t just that Menefee was a kid, because he was plenty old enough to have served through the whole war. But he wasn’t the Old Man. The
Josephus Daniels
was Sam’s responsibility. If anything went wrong, the blame landed squarely on him. Command made you the loneliest, most worried man in the world—or at least on your ship. The poor son of a bitch in charge of the destroyer half a mile away knew what you were going through, though. So did the sub skipper who was trying to send you to the bottom.

Bombers and covering fighters roared off the carriers’ flight decks. Squadron after squadron buzzed off toward the southwest, toward Cap-Haïtien and Port-au-Prince. More fighters flew combat air patrol above the fleet.

Battleships’ guns roared. The battlewagons didn’t rule the fleet the way they had when Sam enlisted back before the Great War started. But their big guns still reached far enough and packed enough punch to make them great for shore bombardment.

Sam’s gaze went forward, to one of the
Josephus Daniels
’ pair of four-inch guns. His smile was fond but wry. That gun could shoot at enemy aircraft from longer range than the twin 40mms that had sprouted like mushrooms everywhere there was free space on the deck. For shore bombardment…Well, you’d better be hitting some place where the bad guys couldn’t hit back.

Slow, squat, ungainly landing craft surged forward. The troops on them were going to take Haiti away from the Confederate States. If everything went right they were, anyhow. If the operation went south, every skipper in the fleet and every brass hat up to and including the Secretary of the Navy would testify under oath before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.

“Anything?” Sam asked Thad Walters.

The Y-ranging officer shook his head. “I’ve got our aircraft on the screen, sir, but I’m not picking up any bandits.”

“I’ll be damned.” Sam glanced over to Lon Menefee. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe the butternut bastards are further gone than I thought.”

“Sure hope so,” Menefee said. “Tell you one thing: when the Marines and the Army guys go ashore, their venereal rate’s gonna climb like one of those fighters. Lots of infected people in Haiti, and the gals there’ll be mighty glad to see ’em.”

“Well, with the spiffy new pills and shots we’ve got, it’s not as bad as it used to be. Still not good,” Sam added hastily—you couldn’t sound complacent about VD. The idea of lying down with a colored woman didn’t drive him wild. But if you were a horny kid and there were no white gals for three islands around, you’d take whatever you could get. He remembered some of his own visits to brothels full of Chinese girls in Honolulu during the last war.

A yeoman came up onto the bridge. “Carriers report airplanes heading our way from Cuba, sir.”

“Thanks, van Duyk,” Sam said. Carriers had stronger Y-ranging sets than his ship did.

The men already stood at battle stations. Sam passed the word that the enemy was on the way. After he stepped back from the PA microphone, Lon Menefee said, “Well, we’re not first on their list, anyhow.”

He was bound to be right about that. The Confederates would want to hit airplane carriers and battlewagons and, he supposed, landing craft before they bothered with a lowly destroyer escort. All the same, Sam said, “If we end up on their plate, they won’t send us back to the kitchen. And we don’t want to get loose and sloppy, either.”

“You’ve got that straight, sir,” Menefee said at once.

“That’s what she said,” Sam answered, and the exec snorted. Overhead, some of the fighters from the CAP streaked off toward the west. Was that a good idea? If more enemy aircraft came at the fleet from another direction, from the Bahamas or from Haiti itself, they might catch the ships with their pants down.

These days, battles mostly happened out of sight of one side’s fleet or the other’s. This one might start out of sight of both. And that record would be hard to top, unless one of these days you got a fight something like the Battle of the Three Navies back in Great War days.

“I have bandits on the screen, sir,” Lieutenant Walters reported. “Bearing 250, approaching…well, pretty fast. Looks like they’re about ten minutes out. Our boys are on ’em.”

“Thanks, Thad,” Sam said, and passed the word to the crew. Then he asked, “Any sign of bandits from some different direction?”

Walters checked his screens before answering, “No, sir.”

Sam grunted. That sounded more like what he’d hoped than what he’d expected. Echoing his thoughts, Lon Menefee said, “The Confederates really must be at the end of their tether.”

“Well, maybe they are. Who woulda thunk it?” Sam called down a speaking tube to the hydrophone station in the bowels of the ship: “Hear anything, Bevacqua?”

“Not a thing, sir,” the CPO replied. “Nothin’ but our screw and the ones from the rest of the fleet. Jack diddly from the pings when I send ’em out.”

“All right. Thanks. Sing out if you do, remember.”

“Better believe it, sir,” Bevacqua said. “It’s my ass, too, you know.”

Hearing that float out of the speaking tube, Menefee raised an eyebrow. It didn’t faze Sam a bit. “Is he wrong?” he asked. The exec shook his head.

Another destroyer escort off to the west started firing. A moment later, so did the
Josephus Daniels
. “They’re going after the carriers,” Sam said, watching the Confederate airplanes.

“Wouldn’t you?” Menefee asked.

“Maybe. But if I could tear up the landing craft, I might want to do that first. This is about Haiti, after all,” Sam said. If it was about the island any more. For all he knew, it might have been about hurting the United States as much as the Confederacy could, and nothing more than that. On such a scale, carriers were likely to count more than landing boats.

But not many C.S. airplanes came overhead. Sam didn’t know how many had set out from Cuba, but he would have bet a lot of them never made it this far. The CAP was doing its job.

The yeoman hurried back up to the bridge. “Our men are ashore, sir,” he said. Sam sent the news out over the loudspeakers. The crew cheered and whooped. Van Duyk didn’t go away. “There’s more news, sir,” he added in quieter tones.

“What’s up?” Apprehension gusted along Sam’s spine.

“Hamburg’s gone, sir,” van Duyk answered. “One of those bombs.”

“Jesus!” Sam said. Churchill hadn’t been kidding, then. England had caught up with the Germans, or at least come close enough to wreck a city. “What does the Kaiser say?”

“Nothing yet, sir,” van Duyk said. “But I sure wouldn’t want to be living in London right now.”

“Me, neither,” Sam agreed. “Or anywhere else a German bomber could get to.” Or a British bomber…Did the limeys have aircraft that could lug what had to be a heavy bomb across the Atlantic to New York City? Did they have bombers that could fly across the Atlantic almost empty and pick up their superbombs in the CSA? That would be easier—if the Confederates had any new superbombs to pick up. All kinds of unpleasant possibilities…

And he couldn’t do a goddamn thing about any of them. All he could do was clap his hands when the forward four-inch gun turned a C.S. bomber into a smear of smoke and flame in the sky.

Abruptly, it was over, at least around the
Josephus Daniels
. He couldn’t spot any more Confederate airplanes above the ship. The gunners went on shooting awhile longer. They didn’t believe in taking chances.

“Boy,” Lon Menefee said. “I hope the guys going ashore have as easy a time as we did.”

“Yeah, me, too,” Sam said. “You would’ve thought the Confederates could throw more at us.”

“A year ago, they could have,” the exec said. “Two years ago, they were throwing the goddamn kitchen sink.”

Carsten nodded. For the first year of the war, things had looked mighty black. Pittsburgh said the CSA wouldn’t be able to conquer the USA. Till then, even that was up in the air. If the Confederates had taken it and gone on toward Philadelphia—But they hadn’t. They couldn’t. And afterwards it became clear they’d thrown too much into that attack, and didn’t have enough left to defend with.

That was afterwards, though. At the time, no one had any idea whether they would fall short. What looked inevitable after the fact often seemed anything but while shells were flying and people were dying. By how much
did
the Confederates fall short in Pittsburgh? Sam didn’t know, and he wasn’t sure anyone else did. All the same, he would have bet the answer was on the order of
only a little bit
.

Lon Menefee’s thoughts ran in a different direction: “Wonder how many smokes our guys’ll find alive on Haiti.”

“Hadn’t worried about that.” Sam bared his teeth in what was anything but a smile. “They would’ve had guns—they were a country before the butternut bastards jumped on ’em. I hope they gave Featherston’s fuckers a good big dose of trouble.” No, he didn’t particularly love Negroes, but he didn’t want to see them dead, either—especially if they were making the Confederates sweat.

C
assius hadn’t thought patrolling Madison, Georgia, and keeping white folks in line could get dull, but it did. Anything you did over and over got dull. Well, he didn’t suppose screwing would, but he hadn’t done enough of that to count as “over and over.” A few hasty grapples with women who’d been part of Gracchus’ band at one time or another were the sum of his experience.

He knew just enough to know he wanted to know more.

And he knew enough to be worried about whether he’d ever get the chance for it. One muggy evening at supper, he asked Gracchus, “Where we gonna find us some nice gals to marry?”

The guerrilla chief looked down at his mess kit, as if hoping one would turn up there. But he had the same roasted pork ribs and sweet potatoes and green beans as Cassius—only those, and nothing more. “Beats me. Beats the shit outa me,” he said heavily. “Most of the niggers left alive down here is the ones in the bands. Ain’t a hell of a lot of gals who wanted to pick up a Tredegar.”

“Don’t I know it! Sometimes I gets so horny, can’t hardly stand it,” Cassius said. “Plenty of white women left with no husbands on account of the war…”

“Good fuckin’ luck! Good
fuckin’
luck!” Gracchus said. “Yeah, plenty o’ white widows. An’ you know what else? They’s sorry their husbands is dead. An’ they’s even sorrier we
ain’t
.”

Cassius wished he thought the older man were wrong. Unfortunately, he didn’t. A shortage of black women and a shortage of white men should have had an obvious solution. Before the war, during the war, saying that where any white could hear him would have got him a one-way ticket to the graveyard. Would things be any different once the CSA finally threw in the sponge?
Fat chance
, he thought.

“Be a few gals don’t care what color man they got, long as they got one,” Gracchus predicted. “A few—the ones who git horny the same way a guy does. But even supposin’ you find one, where you gonna set up housekeepin’ wid her? Any place you try, how long ’fore the neighbors burn your house down, likely with the both of you in it?”

“The Yankees—” Cassius began.

Gracchus shook his head. “Yankees can’t be everywhere. ’Sides, most of ’em don’t want us messin’ wid no white women, neither. They kin use us, yeah. But they ain’t gonna stick their necks out fo’ us when they don’t got to, and you kin bet your ass on dat. Hell, you mess wid a white woman, you
is
bettin’ your sorry ass on dat.”

“Shit,” Cassius said, again not because he thought Gracchus was wrong but because he didn’t. “Maybe we go up to the USA, then. Got to be some colored gals there who’d give us the time o’ day.”

“Might not be too bad, if the Yankees let us,” Gracchus allowed. “But we ain’t U.S. citizens any more’n we’s Confederate citizens. We don’t belong nowhere. You don’t believe me, go ask a white man.”

Once more, he made more sense than Cassius wished he did. Every time you tried to get around what Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party had done to Negroes in the Confederate States, you banged your head into a stone wall instead.

The next morning, a couple of Confederate privates and a corporal came up to Cassius as he was on patrol. None of them was carrying a weapon. When they saw him, they all raised their hands and stood very still. “Don’t shoot, pal,” the corporal said. “We’re just lookin’ for somebody to surrender to, that’s all. Reckon you’re it.”