In at the Death (49 page)

Pound couldn’t even tell him to go to hell, because the other man had been through what he was in the middle of now and had come out the other side. “It
is
a bitch,” was as much as he thought he could say.

“Oh, I know,” the doctor answered quietly. “I still miss the needle sometimes, but I’ll be damned if I go back to it…and you can take that any way you please.” He nodded and walked on to the next patient.

He looked like such a mild little fellow, too: the kind who slid through life without anything much ever happening to him. Which only proved you never could tell. Michael Pound had seen that plenty of times with soldiers he got to know. He wondered why he was so surprised now.

He wished he could get up and do things, but he was stuck on his back—or sometimes, to stave off bedsores, on his stomach. The therapists said he could put weight on his feet in a couple of weeks. He looked forward to that, and then again he didn’t. Till you’d been through a lot of pain, you didn’t understand how much you wanted to stay away from more.

In the meantime, he had magazines and newspapers and the handful of books in the hospital library. He voraciously devoured them. He also had the wireless. He would have listened to news almost all the time. The other guys in the ward plumped for music and comedies and dramas. Pound endured their programs—he couldn’t try throwing his weight around, not unless he wanted everybody else to hate him. But the news was all that really mattered to him.

Sometimes the other burned men gave in to him, too, especially in the middle of the night when they were all too likely to be awake and when the regular programs were even crappier than they were the rest of the time. And so he was listening to a news program when a flash came in.

“We interrupt this broadcast,” said the man behind the mike. “This just in from the BBC—the Churchill government has fallen. Parliament voted no confidence in the Churchill-Mosley regime that has run the United Kingdom for more than ten years. Pending elections, a caretaker government under Sir Horace Wilson has been formed. Wilson has announced that his first action as Prime Minister will be to seek an armistice from the Kaiser.”

The room erupted. A nurse rushed in to quiet the whoops and cheers. When she found out what had happened, she let out a whoop herself.

“They only had two!” Pound said.

“Two what?” the nurse asked.

“Two bombs,” Pound and two other guys said at the same time. Pound went on, “They had two, and the second one didn’t go off where they wanted it to, and that was it. Now the Germans can blow up their cities one at a time, and they can’t hit back.”

“Wow,” the nurse said. “Are you a general? You talk like a general.”

“I’m a lieutenant,” he answered. “I’ve got gray hair ’cause I was a sergeant for years and years. They finally promoted me, and they’ve been regretting it ever since.”

She laughed. “You’re funny, too! I like that.”

He wished he had a private room. Maybe something interesting would have happened. The ward didn’t even boast curtains around the beds. Whatever they did to you, everybody else got to watch. After a while, you mostly didn’t care. This once, Pound might have.

“Only Featherston left,” said the man in the next bed.

“What do we do when we catch him?” somebody asked.

“String him up!” The answer came from Pound and several other wounded soldiers at the same time. It also came from the nurse. She suggested stringing the President of the CSA up by some highly sensitive parts of his anatomy. Coming from most women, that would have shocked Pound. He’d seen that nurses had mouths at least as raunchy as those of soldiers. It made sense: nurses saw plenty of horrors, too.

“My God,” someone else said. “The war really is just about over.”

Nobody made any snide comments about that. Maybe the other men in the ward had as much trouble taking it in as Michael Pound did. The war had consumed his whole being for the past three years—and before that, when he’d been down in Houston before it returned to the CSA, he might as well have been at war.

He wondered what he’d do when peace finally broke out. Would the Army want to keep a first lieutenant with gray hair? The service needed some grizzled noncoms; they tempered junior officers’ puppyish enthusiasm. But he’d never be anything more than a junior officer himself, and he was much too goddamn old for the role.

If they turned him loose, if they patted him on the back and said,
Well done
—
now we’ll go use up somebody else
, what the hell would he do then? He had no idea. The thought was frightening enough. The Army had been his life since he was eighteen years old.

They couldn’t just throw him out…could they?

“Shit,” another burned man said. “This fuckin’ war’s never gonna be over—excuse my French, miss.”

“I’ve heard the words before,” the nurse said dryly.

The soldiers laughed. The one who’d been talking went on, “It won’t be. Honest to God, it won’t. Maybe the Confederate government finally surrenders, yeah, but we’ll stay on occupation duty down here forever. Lousy bushwhackers and diehards won’t start singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ tomorrow, and you can take that to the bank. We have grandchildren,
they’ll
be down here shooting at waddayacallems—rebels.”

Three or four guys groaned, probably because they thought the burned man was likely to be right. Michael Pound felt like cheering, for exactly the same reason. He didn’t—everybody else would have thought he was nuts. But he felt like it. If the war, or something a lot like the war, went on and on, the Army wouldn’t have any excuse to throw him out on his ear.

Well, it wouldn’t have any excuse except maybe that he’d made himself too obnoxious for the brass to stand. Not without pride, he figured he was capable of that.

“Once we get done licking the Confederates, do we go after the Japs next?” asked the guy in the next bed.

If the General Staff of the burn ward of the military hospital outside Chattanooga had their way, the answer to that one was no. Pound wouldn’t have minded seeing the Sandwich Islands, but not as a way station to a battle somewhere even farther off in the Pacific. The Japs had their sphere, and the United States had theirs, and as long as neither side poached on the other that was fine with him.

He did say, “I bet they’re working overtime in Tokyo, trying to figure out how to build a superbomb.”

“Wouldn’t you be?” said the soldier next to him.

“You bet I would,” Pound answered. “As long as we’ve got it and they don’t, it’s a club we can use to beat them over the head. I bet the Tsar’s telling all his scientists they’re heading for Siberia if they don’t make one PDQ, too. If the Germans have one and the Russians don’t, they’re in big trouble.”

He wondered whether Austria-Hungary would try to make one. Berlin was the senior partner there, and had been since the early days of the Great War. Germany had saved Austria-Hungary’s bacon against the Russians then, and again this time around. But Vienna had some clever scientists, too. You never could tell, Pound decided with profound unoriginality.

“Before long, everybody and his mother-in-law’s going to have those…miserable things.” A soldier had mercy on the nurse’s none-too-delicate ears. “How do we keep from blowing each other to kingdom come?”

That was a good question. It was probably
the
question on the minds of the striped-pants set these days. If the diplomats came up with a halfway decent answer, they would earn their salaries and then some.

Michael Pound thought about the CSA’s rockets. If you could load superbombs onto bigger, better ones, you could blow up anybody you didn’t like, even if he didn’t live next door. Wouldn’t that be fun?

Could you make a rocket shoot down another rocket? Airplanes shot down airplanes…some of the time, anyhow. Why shouldn’t rockets shoot down rockets…some of the time, anyhow? Would that be enough? Pound had no idea, which left him in the same leaky boat as everybody else in the world.

XIII

J
ake Featherston felt trapped. The skies over North Carolina had been lousy with damnyankee fighter-bombers coming down from the north. Now that he’d crossed into South Carolina, the skies were lousy with damnyankee fighter-bombers coming up from the south. He and the handful of loyalists who clung to him through thick and thin moved by night and lay up by day, like any hunted animals.

Only chunks of the Confederate States still answered to the Confederate government: pieces of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina; the part of Cuba that wasn’t in revolt; most of Florida; most of Sonora and Chihuahua (which, cut off by the goddamn treasonous Republic of Texas, might as well have been on the far side of the moon); and a core of Mississippi, Louisiana, and most of Arkansas. If the war would go on, if the war could go on, it would have to go on there.

One thing wrong: Jake hadn’t the faintest idea how to reach his alleged redoubt. “What are we going to do?” he demanded of Clarence Potter. “Jesus H. Christ, what
can
we do? They’re squeezing us tighter every day, the bastards.”

“O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams,” Potter answered.

“What the hell is
that
?” Jake said.

“Shakespeare.
Hamlet
.”

“Hot damn! I don’t need to go back to school now, thank you kindly.” Featherston glared at the longtime foe who’d done him so much good. “What are you doing here, anyway? Why don’t you give yourself up to the USA? You can tell ’em you’ve hated my guts since dirt.”

“If things were different, I might,” Potter said calmly. “But I’m the guy who blew up Philadelphia, remember. And I did it wearing a Yankee uniform, too.”

“I’m not likely to forget.” Jake’s laugh was a hoarse, harsh bark. “You got out again, too, in spite of everything. I bet those sons of bitches are shitting rivets on account of it.”

“Bad security,” Potter said. “If we had another superbomb, we could get it up there.”

That made Featherston cuss. They would have another bomb in a few months—if the United States didn’t overrun Lexington first, which seemed unlikely. Henderson FitzBelmont had moved heaven and earth to make one superbomb. Now, when the CSA needed lots of them, he got constipated. You couldn’t count on anybody—except yourself. Always yourself.

“But now the United States want to kill me worse than you ever did,” Potter went on. “And they’ve got an excuse, because I wore their uniform. So in case they find out who I am, I expect I’m dead. Which means I’m all yours, Mr. President.”

“All mine, huh? Then why the devil ain’t you a redheaded gal with legs up to here?”

“You can’t have everything, sir. You’ve still got Ferd Koenig along for the ride, and you’ve still got Lulu.”

She sat in a different motorcar, parked under some trees not far away. Jake looked over in that direction to make sure she couldn’t overhear before he said, “She’s a wonderful woman in all kinds of ways, but not that one. I do believe I’d sooner hump me a sheep.”

“Well, she doesn’t do anything for me, either, but she worships the ground you walk on,” Potter said. “God knows why.”

“Fuck you, too,” Featherston said without rancor. “She’s a good gal. I don’t want to make her unhappy or anything, so she better not hear that from you.”

“She won’t. I don’t play those kinds of games,” Potter said, and Jake decided to believe him. The Intelligence officer wasn’t usually nasty in any petty way. After a moment, Potter went on, “You know, you’re right—you
are
nice to Lulu. You go out of your way to be nice to Lulu. How come you don’t do that with anybody else?”

There was a question Jake had never asked himself. Now he did, but he only shrugged. “Damned if I know, Potter. It’s just how things worked out, that’s all. I like Lulu. Rest of the world’s full of assholes.”

“I wish I could tell you you were wrong,” Potter said. Airplanes droned by overhead—Yankee airplanes. They were going to hit something farther north. Columbia was already in U.S. hands, so they could drop their load on North Carolina and then land in Virginia. With a sigh, Potter asked, “How are we going to make it out West? Do you think we can get an Alligator to land anywhere near here? Do you think it could fly across Georgia and Alabama without getting shot down?”

“Wouldn’t bet on it,” Jake answered mournfully. “What I was thinking was, if we put on civvies and make like we’re a bunch of guys who gave up, we can say we’re going home and sneak across what the damnyankees are holding, and they won’t be any wiser. How do you like it?”

Potter pursed his lips. “If we can’t get an Alligator, maybe. If we can, I believe I’d sooner fly at night and take the chance of getting blown out of the sky.”

Jake scowled at him. Potter looked back unperturbed, as if to say,
Well, you asked me
. He was one of the few men who never sugarcoated their opinions around the President of the CSA. Reluctantly, Featherston respected him for that. And he was too likely to be right, damn him. “I’ll see what we can come up with,” the President said.

When his shrunken entourage drove into Spartanburg, South Carolina, he found the colonel in charge of the town’s defenses lost in gloom. “Damnyankees are on the way, and to hell with me if I know how to stop ’em,” the officer said.

“Do your best,” Jake answered. “Now let me get on the horn to Charlotte.” That was the closest place where he thought he was likely to find a transport. And he did. And, after some choice bad language, he persuaded the authorities there to fly it down to Spartanburg.

“If it gets shot down—” some officious fool in Charlotte said.

“If it doesn’t get here,
you’ll
get shot down.” Jake wasn’t sure he could bring off the threat. But the jerk up in Charlotte couldn’t be sure he couldn’t.

The Alligator landed late in the afternoon. Ground crew personnel swarmed out with camouflage nets to make it as invisible as they could. “Do we really want to do this?” Ferd Koenig asked.

“If you don’t, then stay here,” Featherston answered. “Say hello to the U.S. soldiers when they catch you.” The Attorney General bit his lip. He got on the airplane with everybody else.

“Don’t know exactly how we’ll land if we have to do it in the dark,” the pilot said.

“You’ll work something out,” Jake told him.

“Well, I sure as hell hope so.” But the pilot didn’t sound too worried. “One thing—if I think this is crazy, chances are the damnyankees will, too. Maybe we’ll surprise ’em so much, we’ll get through ’em just like shit through a goose.”

“Now you’re talking. You take off in the wee small hours,” Jake said. “Fly low—stay under the Y-ranging if you can. Goddammit, we aren’t licked yet. If we can just make the enemy see that occupying our country is more expensive than it’s worth, we’ll get their soldiers out of here and we’ll get a peace we can live with. May take a while, but we’ll do it.”

He believed every word of it. He’d been fighting his whole life. He didn’t know anything else. If he had to lead guerrillas out of the hills for the next twenty years, he was ready to do it. After so many fights, what was one more? Nothing to faze him—that was for sure.

After they got airborne, the pilot asked, “Want me to put on my wing lights?”

“Yeah, do it,” Jake answered. “If the Yankees see ’em, they’ll reckon we’re one of theirs. I hope like hell they will, anyway.”

“Me, too,” the pilot said with feeling, but he flicked the switch. The red and green lights went on.

The Alligator droned south and west—more nearly south than west at first, because neither the pilot nor Jake wanted to come too close to Atlanta. If U.S. forces would be especially alert anywhere, they both figured that was the place.

Looking out of one of the transport’s small side windows, Jake had no trouble figuring out when they passed from C.S.-to U.S.-held territory. The blackout in the occupied lands was a lot less stringent. The Yankees didn’t expect Confederate bombers overhead, damn them. And the worst part was, the Yankees had every right not to expect them. The Confederacy didn’t have many bombers left, and mostly used the ones it did have in close support of its surviving armies.

Turbulence made the Alligator bounce. Somebody gulped, loudly. “Use the airsick bag!” three people shouted at the same time. The gulper did. It helped—some.

And then turbulence wasn’t the only thing bouncing the Alligator. Shells started bursting all around the airplane. Suddenly, the road through the air might have been full of potholes—big, deep ones. A major general who wasn’t wearing a seat belt went sprawling.

“Get us the fuck out of here!” Jake yelled. If Lulu sniffed or squawked, he didn’t hear her.

Engines roaring, the transport dove for the deck. The antiaircraft guns pursued. Shrapnel clattered into the wings and tore through the fuselage. Somebody in there shrieked, which meant jagged metal tore through a person, too.

“We’re losing fuel!” the pilot shouted. “Lots of it!”

“Can we go on?” Jake had to bellow at the top of his lungs to make himself heard.

“Not a chance in church,” the pilot answered. “We’d never get there.”

“Can you land the son of a bitch?”

“If I can’t, we’re all dead,” the man answered. Jake remembered that he hadn’t been thrilled about landing at night even in Confederate-held territory. How much less enthusiastic would he be about a nighttime emergency landing on enemy soil?
I told him to put on the wing lights
, Jake thought.
Did it matter? Too goddamn late to worry about it now
.

He hated having his fate in somebody else’s hands. If he was going out, he saw himself trading bullets with the damnyankees and nailing plenty of them before they finally got him. This way…
Dammit, I’m a hero. The script isn’t supposed to work like this
.

“Brace yourselves!” the pilot shouted. “Belts on, everybody! I’m putting it down. I think that’s a field up ahead there—hope like hell it is, anyway. Anybody gets out, let Beckie know I love her.”

One of the engines died just before the Alligator met the ground—that was one hell of a leak, all right. The transport was built to take it and built to land on rough airstrips—but coming down in a tobacco field with no landing lights was more than anybody could reasonably expect.

But it got down. It landed hard, hard enough to make Jake bite the devil out of his tongue. One tire blew. The Alligator slewed sideways. A wingtip dug into the ground. The transport tried to flip over. The wing broke off instead. The fire started then.

“Out!” the pilot screamed. “Out now!” The airplane hadn’t stopped moving, but nobody argued with him. Jake was the second man out the door. He had to jump down to the ground, and turned an ankle when he hit. Swearing savagely, he limped away.

“Fuck!” he said in amazement. “I’m alive!”

C
larence Potter wondered how many nasty ways he could almost die. This blaze was a lot smaller than the radioactive fire he’d touched off in Philadelphia, but it was plenty big enough to give a man an awful fore-taste of hell before it finally killed him. To the poor chump roasting, how could any fire be bigger than that?

He heard Jake Featherston’s obscene astonishment from not far away. It summed up how he felt, too. He’d scrambled away from the burning Alligator right after the President of the CSA. Was everybody out? He looked at the pyre that had been a transport. Anybody who wasn’t out now never would make it, that was for damn sure.

“Where the hell are we?” Ferdinand Koenig’s deep voice came from over to the right.

“Somewhere in Georgia—I can’t tell you anything else.” That was the pilot. Nobody would have to deliver his message to Beckie…yet.

But they weren’t free and clear, not by a long shot. “Let’s get out of here,” Potter said. “This field will be swarming with Yankees in nothing flat.”

Some of the Confederate big shots weren’t going anywhere. “I think my leg is busted,” said the general who’d replaced Nathan Bedford Forrest III as chief of the General Staff. Potter couldn’t remember his name; as far as Potter was concerned, the officer wasn’t worth remembering. “I’m not going anywhere quick.”

“You can surrender, Willard. Don’t reckon they’re shooting soldiers—only politicians,” Jake Featherston said. “Just don’t tell ’em I’m around.”

“I wouldn’t do that, sir,” Willard said.
First name or last?
Potter wondered. Hell, it didn’t matter to anybody but Willard any more.

“General Potter is right,” Saul Goldman said. Potter blinked. He hadn’t even known the Director of Communications got on the Alligator. Goldman was so quiet and self-effacing, he could disappear in plain sight.

Lulu was hurt, too, hurt badly. “I don’t want the Yankees to get me, Mr. President,” she told Jake. “Will you please shoot me and put me out of my misery?”

“I don’t want to do that!” Featherston exclaimed.

“Please,” Lulu said. “I can’t go on. It’s the last thing you can do for me, since…Oh, never mind. You didn’t care about that, not with me.”

She knew what she was talking about. Jake had put it more pungently the afternoon before, but it amounted to the same thing. The President of the CSA muttered to himself. He started to turn away, then turned back. Potter had rarely seen him indecisive—wrong often, sometimes disastrously so, but hardly ever at a loss. “Christ,” he said under his breath.

“Hurry,” Lulu said. “You can’t stay here.”

Potter hadn’t imagined he would find Lulu agreeing with him, either. “Christ,” Jake said again, a little louder this time. Then he yanked the .45 out of the holster he always wore. He fired, and whispered, “Sorry, Lulu,” as he did. “Come on!” Now he almost shouted. “Let’s get the fuck away from here.”

They stumbled and limped through the field. The only light came from the burning Alligator, and they were trying to put it behind them as fast as they could. “That must have been hard, sir,” Potter said after a while: cold comfort, he realized as soon as he spoke, if any at all.

“Feels like I just shot my own luck,” Featherston answered, his voice rough with—tears? “That make any sense at all to you?”