Return Engagement (30 page)

He had to get out—if he could. The controls still answered, after a fashion. He got the crippled fighter over onto its back, opened the canopy, undid the harness that held him in his armored seat, and fell free.

The slipstream tore at him. He just missed killing himself by smashing into the Wright’s tail. Then he was clear of the airplane, clear and falling toward the ground far below—far below now, but drawing closer with inexorable speed.

He yanked the ripcord. Folded silk spilled out from the pack on his back. He’d put the parachute in there himself. If it didn’t open the way it was supposed to, he’d curse himself all the way down.

Whump!
The shock when the canopy opened was enough to make him bite his tongue. He tasted blood in his mouth. Considering what might have happened, he wasn’t complaining. He hung in midair. All at once, he went from brick to dandelion puff. Even so, he would sooner have done this for fun than to save his own neck.

His fighter hit the ground and burst into flames, just like the Mule he’d shot down. And he hadn’t finished saving his own neck, either—here came the Hound Dog that had knocked him out of the sky. Or maybe it was another one—he couldn’t tell. But he’d never felt more helpless than he did now, hanging in the air.

During the Great War, hardly any fliers had worn a parachute. The ones who did were reckoned fair game till they got to the ground. If that Confederate pilot wanted to fire a machine-gun burst into him, he couldn’t do one goddamn thing about it. He had a .45 on his hip, but he didn’t bother to reach for it.

Instead of shooting, the Confederate waggled his wings and zoomed away. Moss thought he saw the other man wave inside the cockpit, but the Hound Dog was gone too fast for him to be sure. He waved his thanks, but he didn’t know if the Confederate could see that, either.

“They aren’t all bastards,” he said, as if someone had claimed they were. He felt weak and giddy with relief. To his disgust, he also realized he felt wet. Somewhere back there, he’d pissed himself. He shrugged inside the parachute harness. He wasn’t the first flier who’d done that, and he wouldn’t be the last. When he got down on the ground, he’d clean himself off. That was all he could do. Only dumb luck he hadn’t filled his pants, too.

He swung his weight to the left, trying to steer the chute away from the trees below and towards a stretch of grass. Was he over Confederate-held territory, or did the USA still have a grip here? He didn’t know. Pretty damn soon, he’d find out.

He passed over a pine almost close enough to kick it on the way down. There was the meadow, coming up. He bent his knees, braced for the impact—and twisted his ankle anyhow. “Son of a bitch!” he said loudly. The chute tried to drag him across the field. He pulled out his knife and sawed at the shrouds. After what seemed a very long time, he cut himself free. He tried to get to his feet. The ankle didn’t want to bear his weight. He could hobble, but that was about it.

From behind him, somebody said, “Hold it right there, asshole!” Moss froze. Was that a U.S. or a C.S. accent? He hadn’t been able to tell. The soldier said, “Turn around real slow, and make sure I can see both hands are empty.”

Moss couldn’t turn any way but slowly. He whooped when he saw the man pointing a rifle at him wore green-gray. “I’m Jonathan Moss, major, U.S. Army Air Force,” he said.

“Yeah, sure, buddy, and I’m Queen of the May,” the U.S. soldier said. For a dreadful moment, Moss thought his career would end right there, finished by someone on his own side. But then the soldier said, “I see you’re heeled. Drop your piece, and don’t do anything stupid or you’ll never find out who wins the Champions’ Cup this year.”

“Whatever you say.” Moss fished his pistol out of the holster with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. He dropped it on the ground, then took a couple of limping steps away from it. “Get me back to your CO. I’ll show him I’m legit.”

The soldier came forward and scooped up the .45. Never for an instant did his Springfield stop pointing at Moss’ brisket. “Maybe you will and maybe you won’t,” he said. “But all right—I’ve pulled your teeth. Come along. You better not try anything funny, or that’s all she wrote.”

“I’m coming,” Moss said. “I can’t run, not on this leg.” The soldier in green-gray only shrugged. Maybe he thought Moss was faking. Moss wished he were. He asked, “Where the hell are we, anyway? I flew out of Indiana, and I got all turned around in the last dogfight.”

“If my lieutenant wants you to know, he’ll tell you,” the soldier answered. “Can’t you move any faster than that?”

“Now that you mention it,” Moss said, “no.” Behind him, the soldier scattered unprintables the way Johnny Appleseed had scattered seeds. The sputter of bad language eased but didn’t stop when they got in under the trees. Moss was glad to get out of the meadow, too; one of those Hound Dogs might have paid a return visit, and shooting up soldiers caught in the open was any pilot’s sport.

“Halt!” an unseen voice called. “Who goes there?”

“No worries, Jonesy—it’s me,” Moss’ captor (rescuer?) replied. “I got me a flyboy—says he’s one of ours. He don’t talk like a Confederate, but he don’t quite talk like one of us, neither.”
That’s what I get for living in Canada for most of twenty years—I started sounding like a Canuck,
Moss thought unhappily.

“Well, bring him on,” Jonesy said. “Lieutenant Garzetti will figure out what the hell to do with him.”

Lieutenant Giovanni Garzetti was a little dark man in his late twenties who looked as if he’d never smiled in his whole life. He made his headquarters in a barn that had had one corner blown off by a shell. He looked Moss and his gear over, asked him a few questions, and said, “Yeah, you’re the goods, all right.” He turned to the soldier who’d brought in the fighter pilot. “Give him back his sidearm, Pratt.”

“Yes, sir,” the soldier said. This was the first time Moss had heard his name. Pratt took the .45 off his belt and handed it back. “Here you go. I didn’t want to take any chances with you, you know what I mean?”

Moss could tell he wouldn’t get any more of an apology than that. He nodded as he slid the pistol into the holster again. “Don’t worry about it.”

“So what can we do for you, Major?” Lieutenant Garzetti asked.

“A bandage for my ankle and a lift to the closest airstrip would be good,” Moss answered. “I can’t walk for beans, but I expect I can still fly.”

“Pratt, go chase down a medic,” Garzetti said. The soldier sketched a salute and departed. Garzetti nodded to Moss. “We’ll get you wrapped up good. Meanwhile . . .” He pulled a little silver flask out of his pocket. “Have a knock of this.”

This
was some of the best—certainly the most welcome—bourbon Moss had ever drunk. “Anesthetic,” he said solemnly, and Garzetti nodded. The lieutenant took a drink from the flask when Moss returned it. Then he put it in his pocket once more. Was he a quiet lush? He didn’t act like one. If he fancied a drink every now and then . . . well, Moss fancied a drink every now and then, too. “Boy, that hit the spot. You sure you aren’t part St. Bernard?”

Lieutenant Garzetti still didn’t smile. His eyes twinkled, though. “If you said on my mother’s side, you’d’ve called me a son of a bitch.”

“That’s not what I meant!” Moss exclaimed.

“I know it’s not, and I’m not flabbling about it,” Garzetti said. A man with a Red Cross armband came in through the missing corner of the barn. “Here’s the medic. Let’s see what he can do.”

After poking and prodding at Moss’ ankle, the medic said, “I don’t
think
it’s busted, Major, but you sure as hell ought to get it X-rayed first chance you find.”

Moss only laughed. “And when’s that likely to be?”

“Beats me, sir, but you ought to. You can mess yourself up bad, trying to do too much on a busted ankle. In the meantime . . .” In the meantime, the medic used what seemed a mummy’s worth of gauze to wrap the injured part. “There you go. Try that. Tell me how it is. If you’re not happy, I’ll put some more on.”

How?
Moss wondered. He got to his feet. The ankle still complained when he put weight on it, but it didn’t scream so loud. He could walk, after a fashion. “Thanks,” he said. “It’s not perfect, but it’s an awful lot better. And as long as I can get into a fighter, what else do I need?” Neither the medic nor Lieutenant Garzetti had anything to say to that.

S
cipio watched bored cops herd colored factory workers onto their buses near the edge of the Terry. He’d got used to that. It bothered him less than it had when he first saw it. The buses brought the workers back every evening. They really did take the men and women to do war work. They didn’t haul them off to those camps from which nobody ever came back. “Come on. Keep moving,” a cop said. “You got to—”

The world blew up.

That was how it seemed to Scipio, anyhow. One minute, he was walking along the streets, watching the workers board the buses and thinking about what he’d be doing once he got to the Huntsman’s Lodge. The next, he was rolling on the ground, tearing out both knees of his tuxedo pants and clapping his hands to his ears in a useless, belated effort to hold out that horrible sound.

Afterwards, he realized that the buses had shielded him from the worst of the blast. The motorcar bomb went off across the street from them. If they hadn’t been in the way, the twisted metal junk screeching through the air in all directions probably would have cut him down, too. As things were, he got a couple of little cuts from flying glass, but nothing worse than that.

Head ringing from the force of the explosion, he staggered upright again. He heard everything as if from very far away. He knew his hearing could come back to normal in a couple of days.
A hell of a country,
he thought,
when you know how things are after a bombing on account of you’ve been through them before.

When he looked at what the bomb had done to the buses and to the people waiting for them, his stomach did a slow lurch. All four buses were burning furiously. That would have been even worse if they’d had gasoline engines rather than using diesel fuel, but it was plenty bad enough as things were. One of them lay on its side; another had been twisted almost into a right angle. And the people . . .

“Do Jesus!” Scipio whispered, realizing just how lucky he’d been. The bomb might have been a harvester for people; the blast had cut them down in windrows. Men and women and bleeding chunks that had belonged to men and women lay everywhere. A policeman’s head stared sightlessly at a black woman’s arm. A disemboweled worker—still somehow wearing his cloth cap—tried to rearrange his guts till he slumped over, unconscious or dead. A man whose face was nothing but raw meat lay on his back and screamed agony to the uncaring sky.

The worst of all this was, Scipio knew what to do. He
had
been through the nightmare before. This wasn’t the first motorcar bomb to hit Augusta—Negroes who hated the Freedom Party had struck before. Scipio began looking for people who’d been badly hurt but might live if someone stanched their bleeding in a hurry. He used whatever he could to do the job: socks, hankies, shirts, shoelace tourniquets.

He wasn’t the only one, either. Passersby and the lucky few the bomb hadn’t hurt badly did what they could to help the wounded. Scipio found himself bandaging a white policeman with a gaping hole in his calf. “Thank you kindly, uncle,” the cop said through clenched teeth.

He meant well. That made the appellation sting more, not less. Even in his pain, all he saw was . . . a nigger. Scipio wanted to find some way to change his mind. If doing his best to save the white man’s life couldn’t turn the trick, he was damned if he knew what could.

Clanging bells announced ambulances and fire engines—a building across the street, by the scattered smoking fragments of the auto that had held the bomb, was burning. Scipio hadn’t even noticed. He was intent on more urgent things close by him. He did hear the ambulance crews’ exclamations of dismay. The men pitched in and helped. To give them their due, they didn’t seem to care whether they aided whites or the far more numerous blacks.

“Here, Pop, scoot over—I’ll take care of that,” one of them said, elbowing Scipio aside. And he did, too, digging a jagged chunk of metal out of a man’s back and bandaging the wound with practiced dispatch. Scipio minded
pop
much less than he’d minded
uncle.
The fellow from the ambulance could have called anyone no longer young
pop
regardless of his color, and Scipio’s hair was gray heading toward white.

One of the ambulances had a radio. A blood-spattered driver was bawling into the microphone: “y’all got to send more people here, Freddy. This is a hell of a mess—worst damn thing I’ve seen since the end of the war . . . Yeah, whatever you can spare. I hope they catch the goddamn son of a bitch who done it. Hang the bastard by his balls, and it’d still be too good for him.”

Scipio was inclined to agree with the driver. He would have bet his last dime that the man who planted the bomb was black. That didn’t change his opinion. What did the bomber hope to accomplish? He’d killed at least twenty of his own kind, and wounded dozens more. He’d wrecked buses that were taking the Negroes to work that kept them out of camps. And the Freedom Party would probably land on the Terry with both feet after this. Would Jake Featherston’s men squeeze another indemnity out of people who had very little to begin with? Or would stalwarts and guards simply fire up Augusta’s whites and start a new pogrom? Oh, they had plenty of choices—all of them bad for Negroes.

More ambulances clattered up to the disaster. The fellow who’d pushed Scipio aside nudged him now. “Thanks for your help, Pop. You can go on about your business, I reckon. Looks like we’re getting enough people to do the job.”

“Yes, suh,” Scipio said. “I stays if you wants me to.”

The ambulance man shook his head. “That’s all right.” He looked Scipio up and down. “If you don’t have a job you need to get to and a boss who’s wondering where you’re at, I’m a damnyankee. Go on, get going.”

Till the man mentioned them, Scipio had forgotten about the Huntsman’s Lodge and Jerry Dover. He surveyed himself. Except for the ruined trousers, he’d do. He didn’t have much blood on his boiled shirt, and his jacket was black, so whatever he had on that didn’t show.