Return Engagement (39 page)

“We have a car waiting for you, sir,” Abell said. “If you’ll just come with me . . .”

“I have a suitcase,” Dowling said.

“It will be taken care of,” the bloodless General Staff officer promised. “That sort of thing, after all, is why God made enlisted men.”

He led Dowling out to a Chevrolet with headlights reduced to slits. A dent in one fender said the little bit of light they threw hadn’t always been enough. “Nice of you to meet me,” Dowling said as they got in. The driver—an enlisted man—started up the engine and put the auto in gear.

Colonel Abell lit a cigarette and offered Dowling the pack. He leaned close to give Dowling a light. Then he smiled—a surprisingly charming smile from someone usually so cold. “Don’t worry, General,” he said, amusement—amusement? yes, definitely amusement—lurking in his voice. “Our interests here run in the same direction.”

“Do they?” Dowling said. Had the General Staff officer told him the sun was shining, he would have gone to a window and checked.

Abell laughed. The noise was slightly rusty, as if from disuse, but unmistakable. “As a matter of fact, they do. You don’t want the Joint Committee crucifying you for losing Ohio, and the War Department doesn’t want the Joint Committee crucifying it for allowing Ohio to be lost.”

“Ah,” Dowling said. That
did
make sense. In the War of Secession, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War had run rampant over the Army. No wonder Colonel Abell and his superiors were anxious to avoid a repeat performance.

“Are you a quick study, General?” Abell asked.

“Tolerably,” Dowling answered. Anyone who’d served under Custer had to be a quick study, to find ways to get his superior out of the trouble he insisted on getting himself into. “Why?”

“Listen to me for about twenty minutes. With things the way they are, getting you to BOQ will take that long anyhow.” Colonel Abell proceeded to fill Dowling’s head with the inadequacies of U.S. military budgets, starting in the early 1920s and continuing to the present day. Dowling found himself nodding again and again. Abell finished, “You know perfectly well we could have put up a much stronger defense in Ohio if we’d had more and better matériel. I want you to let the Joint Committee know, too.”

“They won’t want to hear it,” Dowling said. “Congress never wants to hear that anything is its fault. But I will tell them. I’ll be delighted to—and I thank you for the chapter and verse.”

“My pleasure, sir,” Abell said as the Chevrolet pulled up in front of Bachelor Officer Quarters.

“Not altogether, Colonel,” Dowling said. “Not altogether.”

His suitcase had beaten him there. He wondered how that had happened. He slept better than he’d thought he would, and it wasn’t just because the Confederates didn’t come over that night.

The next morning, as another noncom drove him to the hall where the Joint Committee met, he got a look at what the bombers had done to Philadelphia when they did come over. It wasn’t pretty. On the other hand, he’d seen worse in Ohio. Oddly, that thought steadied him. When he got to the hall and was sworn in, his first interrogator was a white-maned Socialist Senator from Idaho, a state that might never have seen a real, live Confederate and surely had never seen a hostile one. “Well, General, to what besides your own incompetence do you ascribe our failures in Ohio?” the Senator brayed.

“Sir, I think one of our worst problems is the fact that Congress put so little money into the military after the end of the Great War,” Dowling answered. “And when the Confederates did start loading up, we didn’t try to match them as hard as we might have. As I recall, sir”—as Colonel Abell had briefed him—“you last voted for an increased military appropriation in 1928—or was it, ‘27?”

He’d heard about men standing with their mouths hanging open while nothing came out. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen it, not till that moment. The sight was sweeter than the sugar he’d spooned into his morning coffee. After close to half a minute, the Senator recovered enough to say, “How dare you blame this august body for your own dismal failings?”

“Sir, war’s been staring us in the face ever since Jake Featherston got elected. That’s almost eight years ago now,” Dowling said. “Anyone could see it. Plenty of people did see it. Why was Congress so slow about giving us the money to build and develop the tools we need to lick the son of a bitch?”

More bellows and barks followed, but the Senator from Idaho seemed more than a little disconcerted by answers he hadn’t expected. He acted relieved to turn the grilling over to a Congresswoman from New York City. Flora Blackford said, “Instead of snarling at each other, what can Congress and the Army do to work together and gain the victory we have to have?”

A sensible question! Dowling had wondered if he’d hear any. “Get all our factories humming,” he answered. “Make sure the raw materials reach them. Make sure the weapons reach the front. Keep the Confederates as busy as we can—never let ’em relax. Uh, knock Utah flat. And while we’re at it, get the niggers in the CSA plenty of guns, as many as we can. That’ll make sure Featherston’s boys stay hopping.”

It went on and on. There was more hostility from the committee members, but also, increasingly, a wary respect. Dowling had no idea whether they were really listening to him or just posturing for the hometown papers. He also had no idea whether he was saving his career or sinking it forever. The strange thing was, he didn’t care. And it was amazing how liberating that could be.

J
ake Featherston looked at the engineer in his cramped, glassed-in booth. Saul Goldman was in there with the engineer. The little Jew didn’t usually look over people’s shoulders like that—he wasn’t pushy, the way sheenies were supposed to be. But this was a big speech. Featherston was glad to see Goldman there. When something needed doing, the director of communications made sure he was on the spot.

The engineer pointed through the glass. Jake nodded. The light on the wall above the booth glowed red. He was on.

“I’m Jake Featherston,” he said, “and I’m here to tell you the truth.” How many times had he said that on the wireless? More than he could count, by now. While he was saying it, he believed it every single time, too. That was what let him make other people believe it right along with him.

“Truth is, we never wanted this here war with the United States. Truth is, they forced it on us when they wouldn’t listen to our reasonable demands. Well, now they’ve paid the price for being stupid. They’ve got their country cut in half, and they’ve seen they can’t hope to stand against us. Our cause is just and right, and that only makes us stronger.

“But I’m a reasonable man. I’ve always been a reasonable man. I want to show I don’t hold a grudge. And so I’m going to offer terms to the USA, and I do believe they’re terms so kind and generous that nobody could possibly say no to ’em.

“First off, as soon as the United States agree to ’em, we’ll pull out of U.S. territory fast as we can. We didn’t want Yankees on our soil in 1917, and we don’t want to be on theirs now.” He’d won, or come as close to winning as didn’t matter to him. Now was the time to sound magnanimous. “All we want is what’s rightfully ours. I’ll tell you what I mean.

“At the end of the last war the USA took Sequoyah and chunks of Virginia and Sonora away from us. We want our country back. We’ve got a right to have our country back. And it’s only fitting and proper for the United States to give back everything they took.”

In the engineer’s booth, Saul Goldman nodded vigorously. Saul was a good guy, as solid as they came. If he worried a little more than most Freedom Party men, well, what could you expect from a Jew? Plenty of Party men had all the balls in the world. Featherston knew he needed some with brains, too. Goldman fit the bill there.

“And it’s only fitting and proper that the United States should pay back the reparations they squeezed out of us when we were down,” Featherston went on. “Paying them killed our currency and damn near ruined us. There was a time when, instead of carrying your money to the store in your pocket and your groceries home in your basket, you needed the basket for your money and you could take home what you bought in your pocket. We don’t ever want that to happen again.”

He didn’t mention that the United States had stopped demanding reparations after a Freedom Party man gunned down the Confederate President in Alabama. If Grady Calkins hadn’t died in that park, Jake would have killed him. He would have stretched it out over days, maybe even weeks, to make sure Calkins suffered the way he should have. The assassin had come closer to murdering the Party than any of its enemies.

And if the United States came down with their own case of galloping inflation . . . If they did, wouldn’t that just be
too
bad. Jake grinned wolfishly. Seeing the USA in trouble would break his heart, all right.

“We don’t want to have to worry about Yankee aggression any more, either,” he went on. “We don’t mind if the United States keep their forts around Washington. That’s all right. George Washington was the father of their country, too, even if he was a good Virginian. But except for those, we want a disarmed border. No more forts within a hundred miles of the frontier. No barrels within a hundred miles, either, or war airplanes. We will have the right to send inspectors into the USA to make sure the Yankees hold up their end of the bargain.”

He didn’t say anything about letting U.S. inspectors travel on the Confederate side of the border. There were good reasons why he didn’t, chief among them that the only way he intended to let U.S. inspectors into the CSA was over his dead body. After the Great War, U.S. snoops had worn out their welcome in a hurry. He didn’t intend to dismantle his fortifications, either, or to move back his fighters and bombers and armor. The United States had let down their guard after the Great War. He wasn’t about to make the same mistake.

Saul Goldman had stopped nodding. He wore a frown. He wanted to make
really
easy terms with the USA. Featherston couldn’t see that. He was on top, by God. What point to being on top if you didn’t take advantage of it? And he needed to squeeze the United States while he
was
on top. They were bigger and richer and more populous than the Confederate States. He never forgot that. No Confederate leader could afford to forget it. However badly the Whigs had botched the Great War, it had proved the Yankees could be dangerous foes, not just a bunch of bumbling fools.

Featherston continued, “And both we and the United States have internal troubles we need to deal with. Unlike some countries I could name,
we
don’t interfere in other nations’ private business.”

He didn’t care about selling the Mormons of Deseret down the river. The USA didn’t need to know he’d supplied the Mormons with weapons and advice. The damnyankees could probably figure it out for themselves, but figuring it out and proving it were two different critters.

And the damnyankees might think he would wait till this war was over to settle accounts with blacks in the CSA. He wanted to laugh. He was going to take care of that business anyway, come hell or high water.

“It’s a shame we had to fight again,” he said. “Now that things are decided, let’s get back to business as usual. It’s time for peace. We only want what’s ours. Too bad we had to go to war to get it, but that’s how things work out sometimes. I’m just waiting on Al Smith to set things to rights. Thank you, and good night.”

The red light went out. He wasn’t on the air any more. He gathered up his speech and left the soundproofed studio. Saul Goldman came out into the hallway to meet him and be the first to shake his hand. “I think that went very well, Mr. President,” Goldman said.

“Thank you kindly, Saul,” Featherston said. “Me, too, matter of fact.”

“I hope President Smith takes you up on it,” the director of communications said. He was good, amazingly good, at what he did, but no, he didn’t have the fire in his belly that a lot of Freedom Party men did.

“So do I. I expect he will,” Jake said. “Why wouldn’t he? It’s been two months, hardly even that, and we’ve knocked the snot out of the USA. We’ve done a damn sight better than the French and the British and the Russians have against Germany and Austria-Hungary, and you can take that to the bank.”

Goldman nodded at that last. As they had in the last war, the Russians had tried to drown the Central Powers in oceans of blood. Against the barrels and artillery the new Kaiser’s army could hurl at them, they’d made small gains for high cost—though Jake did think the Central Powers were going to lose most of the Ukraine, which had always been more nearly subject than ally.

France had reached the Rhine, driving through the rugged country to the west of the river. But she hadn’t been able to cross the river, and the Germans claimed they were rallying.
Action Française
denied that with particular venom, which made Jake all the more inclined to believe it true. And the British end run through Norway had accomplished nothing but infuriating the Norwegians and pushing them over to the German side. Churchill had got himself a black eye with that one.

Only the Anglo-French thrust through the Low Countries was still going well. The Belgians had welcomed the French and British as liberators, the way the Ukrainians welcomed the Russians. The Dutch were more pro-German, but the Germans had had a lot of other things on their plate. Holland was lost to them, and some of the North German plain. If Hamburg fell . . . But it hadn’t fallen yet.

Jake’s smile showed sharp teeth. His allies might be having trouble, but he’d done what he’d set out to do. “Yeah, I reckon Smith’ll come around,” he said.
Come across
came closer to what he really meant.

“I do hope he does,” Saul Goldman said earnestly. “I wish you hadn’t put in that part about demilitarizing the border. He won’t like that.”

“He may not like it, but he’ll swallow it,” Featherston said. “I know my man.”

He thought he did. He’d slickered Smith into agreeing to the plebiscite that brought Kentucky and the abortion called Houston back into the CSA. And Smith had believed him when he said he wouldn’t put troops into the redeemed states for years. Finding an excuse to do what you needed to do anyway was never hard.