Return Engagement (59 page)

“I can’t tell you that, either,” Roosevelt said. “I will tell you that it is more important than my job. If you want to send me to the calaboose for contempt of Congress, I will cheerfully go. It is
that
important. It is so important, I am going to ask you to let me sell you a pig in a poke and trust me without asking any more questions. If you do, I will thank you. If you don’t, Jake Featherston will. Up to you.”

He meant every word of that, too. Whether he was right or wrong was a different question—and he didn’t want to give Flora any clues that would let her decide. She said, “You don’t make this easy, do you?”

“Few things in wartime are easy. Figuring out whether to keep this secret is one of them,” he answered.

“If you turn out to be wrong, Mr. Roosevelt, there is no place in the world you can hide from me,” Flora said.

“That’s fair,” Roosevelt said at once. “If you have a price, I will pay it. The administration will pay it. You were unhappy President Smith hasn’t said more about the way the CSA treats its Negroes. He could. He would. He will, if you like.”

“The last time we talked about this, you said it was between the President and me,” Flora reminded him. “You told me you couldn’t do anything about it. I believed you.” Of course she’d believed him. What he’d told her was the way things always worked in the U.S. government—or any other. “Why have you changed your mind? Why do you think he’ll change his?”

“Because he agrees with me about how important this is—and how important keeping it secret is,” Franklin Roosevelt answered.

Flora didn’t ask him if he could deliver. She had no doubt he could. But what was so very important out there by the Pacific that Al Smith would change a political position he’d taken after the coldest of calculations? She started to ask the Assistant Secretary of War. Only one thing held her back: the certainty that he wouldn’t tell her.

Slowly, she said, “I think I will take you up on that. This war has a moral element. We aren’t just fighting it to protect ourselves, though we certainly are doing that. But the Confederates are committing crimes against humanity. They need to be stopped.”

“Crimes against humanity,” Roosevelt echoed. Flora could hear the faint scrape of pen on paper. “It’s a good phrase, a telling phrase. You’ll hear it again. Is there anything else?”

There was one thing more—the secret Roosevelt was willing to pay any price to preserve. Again, though, Flora knew he wouldn’t tell her. “No, I don’t think so,” she answered, and wondered what sort of deal she’d just made. Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t her idea of the Devil—but how could she be sure?

She couldn’t. That bothered her more than anything. She’d done it anyhow. Done what, exactly? Agreed to keep quiet about something he wished she’d never found in the first place. It was almost as if she’d discovered him being unfaithful to his wife.

Would she have kept quiet about something like that? She didn’t suppose she would have gone out of her way to talk about it, but. . . . She didn’t suppose Roosevelt could have offered such a tempting bargain about that, either.

What on earth
was
going on out there to make them willing to go so far to cover it up? Flora laughed. She almost wanted to be difficult just so she could find out.

She wondered if they were developing some fancy new poison gas. Western Washington was full of empty square miles. If you wanted to experiment with something toxic, you wouldn’t do it in New York City. You’d go someplace where a mishap wouldn’t turn into a disaster.

Slowly, Flora nodded to herself. If she had to bet, she would have put her money on something like that. The longer the Confederates didn’t know what was going on, the shorter the time they’d have to start working on an antidote or new protective clothing or whatever they’d need to neutralize the weapon once the United States trotted it out.

She nodded again. That left her more or less satisfied, but it also left her more than a little miffed. No matter how she’d threatened Roosevelt, she wasn’t about to start screaming about a new poison gas from the housetops. She wanted this war won, too. Didn’t Roosevelt see that? Evidently not. He’d promised her the sun, moon, and little stars to keep her mouth shut instead.

The telephone in the outer office rang. Bertha answered it. She called, “Congresswoman, it’s the President.”

Flora picked up the phone on her desk. “Hello, Mr. President,” she said.

“Hello, sweetheart,” Al Smith answered. “So you want me to squawk about the
shvartzers,
do you? So all right, I’ll do it.” Like a lot of New York Irish politicians, he could sound very Jewish when he wanted to.

“That’s . . . kind of you, sir,” Flora said. “I still don’t quite understand why you’re raising such a fuss.”

“I know,” Smith said. “Franklin made the deal with you so you wouldn’t ask questions, remember, not so you would.”

“Oh, yes. I remember. I’m not likely to forget,” Flora answered. “If you meet your end, I’ll meet mine.” She said that with a curious reluctance. “I won’t ask any questions. I won’t poke my nose where it doesn’t belong. But if you think I won’t be ready to blow up from curiosity, you’d better think again.”

Al Smith laughed. Even then, he sounded tired. “Well, I’ve been worrying about some bigger bangs than that lately.”

“Not likely,” Flora said. The President laughed again. He made a kissing noise over the telephone and hung up. Flora smiled as she did, too. She was still curious, but she didn’t feel quite so bad about the bargain now.

M
ajor Jonathan Moss bounced to a stop at an airstrip outside a Maryland town with the odd name of Texas. One after another, the rest of his fighter squadron landed behind him—all except one pilot, who’d had engine trouble and had to come down somewhere in western Pennsylvania. Moss hoped the missing man would get repairs and rejoin the squadron soon. By the looks of things here in the East, they were going to need all the help they could get.

Led by a groundcrew man with wigwag flags, Moss taxied into a revetment. As soon as his prop had stopped spinning, more groundcrew men spread camouflage netting over his Wright. He slid back the canopy and climbed out.

“Looks like the balloon’s going to go up here pretty soon,” he remarked.

“Beats me,” the groundcrew man answered. “Far as I’m concerned, we’ve already been sitting around too long with our thumbs up our asses.”

A man of strong convictions,
Moss thought, amused. But then again, why not? Everybody in the USA seemed to wonder why the attack here in the East hadn’t started yet. Moss’ flying boots dug into mud as he walked out of the revetment. The rain had messed things up. He knew that. And the high command here was pulling together whatever it could to add to the fight. But didn’t the powers that be think the Confederates were doing the same damn thing?

Martin Rolvaag came out of another revetment. Moss’ wingman waved to him. “At least we didn’t have to fight our way across Ohio,” Rolvaag said.

“That occurred to me, too,” Moss admitted. “Can’t say I’m sorry we didn’t.”

“Way it looks to me, we can’t do more than one big thing at a time, and neither can the Confederates,” Rolvaag said. “As soon as one side or the other manages to run two full-scale attacks at once, it’ll have the edge.”

“Makes sense,” Moss said. Rolvaag usually did. Along with the rest of the pilots from the squadron, they walked toward the biggest camouflaged tent nearby. Either that would hold local headquarters, in which case they could get billeted, or it would be the local officers’ club, in which case they could get lit.

It turned out to be local headquarters. Several fliers looked disappointed. Moss was a little disappointed himself, but only a little. They’d be going into action soon, and he didn’t want to fly hung over. Some of the younger guys didn’t give a damn. Back in the Great War, he hadn’t given a damn, either.

The captain who let them know where they’d be eating and sleeping (and who told them where the officers’ club was, so they could drink, too) only shrugged when Moss asked him when the U.S. push toward Richmond would start. “Sir, when the orders come in, they’ll get to you, I promise. We won’t leave you on the ground,” he said. “Past that, you know as much as I do.”

“I don’t know a damn thing,” Moss complained. The captain just nodded, as if to say they were still even.

After supper, Moss did find his way to the officers’ club. Blackout curtains inside the tent flap made sure no light leaked out. The fog of cigarette smoke inside would have done a pretty good job of dimming the light even without the curtains. Along with tobacco, the air smelled of beer and whiskey and sweat.

Moss made his way up to the bar and ordered a beer. He reminded himself that drink wasn’t spelled with a
u.
As he sipped, he listened to the chatter around him. When he discovered that the three men immediately to his left were reconnaissance pilots, he started picking their brains. If anybody could tell him what the Confederates were up to, they were the men.

But they couldn’t tell him much. One said, “Bastards know how to palm their cards as well as we do. If they haven’t got more than they’re showing, we’ll waltz into Richmond. ’Course, I hope to hell they’re saying,, ‘Sure don’t look like them damnyankees got much up there a-tall.” “ His impression of a Confederate accent was less than successful.

“Here’s hoping,” Moss agreed. A second beer followed the first. He had a few more over the evening. He didn’t get drunk—he was sure of that—but he did get happy. He heard about as many opinions of Daniel MacArthur as there were people offering them.

Not long after he hit the sack, Confederate bombers came overhead. They were doing their best to disrupt what they had to know was coming. Moss ran for a damp trench. He didn’t think any of their load hit the airstrip, but it wasn’t coming down very far away. He hoped U.S. bombers were paying similar calls on the defenders. Soldiers who went without sleep didn’t fight as well as those who got their rest.

Orders for his squadron came in the next morning. He’d wondered if they’d been sent east to escort bombers. They hadn’t had any training or practice in that role. But instead the command was ground attack. Moss nodded to himself. They could handle that just fine. And he had a date—three days hence. He talked with men who’d been in Maryland longer about local landmarks and Confederate antiaircraft.

The day of the attack dawned cold and gloomy. Moss yawned as he went to his fighter. He didn’t like the low clouds overhead. They would make it harder for him to find his targets. He managed a shrug. His squadron wouldn’t be the only one hitting the Confederates. He could probably tag along with someone else.

He ran through his flight checks with impatience, but was no less thorough because he was impatient. Like a modern automobile, the Wright had a self-starter. No groundcrew man needed to spin the prop for him. He poked the button. The engine roared to life; the propeller blurred into a disk.

He raced down the runway and flung himself into the air. One by one, the airplanes in his squadron followed. They rocketed south toward Virginia and the enemy. Moss got the feeling of being part of something much bigger than himself. He’d known it in the Great War, too, but seldom in this fight.

As they got farther south, the clouds began to break up. That was a relief. Maybe the people who’d ordered the attack weren’t complete idiots after all. Then again, you never could tell. Moss got a quick glimpse of Washington, D.C., before he zoomed over the Potomac. Plumes of smoke rose here and there from the formal capital—for all practical purposes, the former capital. Confederate bombers must have visited there the night before. Not even Y-ranging had helped fighters do much to track bombers by night.

After the Potomac, the next good-sized river was the Rappahannock. If U.S. soldiers could get over the Rappahannock and the Rapidan, the next stop was Richmond, which lay on the north bank of the James.

Crossing the Rappahannock wouldn’t be a whole lot of fun, though. Confederate artillery was zeroed in on the river, and pounded the pontoon bridges U.S. military engineers were running up under the not quite adequate cover of their own artillery. Asskickers were out dive-bombing those bridges, too. Moss watched one crash into the Rappahannock in flames. Somebody had thought to bring plenty of antiaircraft guns forward, then. Good.

And there were plenty of Confederate antiaircraft guns right up at the front, too. Shells began bursting around Moss and his squadron even while they were on the U.S. side of the Rappahannock. He hoped those came from Confederate guns. He didn’t like the idea of getting shot down by his own side. Come to that, he didn’t like the idea of getting shot down by the enemy, either.

He dove on a battery of Confederate artillery pieces. He could damn well shoot back at the bastards on the other side. He thumbed the firing button. His Wright seemed to stagger a little in the air from the recoil of the guns. Soldiers in butternut scattered as he roared past overhead. Muzzle flashes showed that some of them were taking potshots at him with whatever small arms they carried. He wasn’t going to lose any sleep over that—he was gone before they could hope to aim.

He had more targets than he could shake a stick at. The Confederates had known this attack was coming, and they’d spent a lot of time getting ready for it. That worried Moss. When the Confederates struck for Lake Erie, they’d caught the USA by surprise. Maybe they shouldn’t have, but so what? Surprise had helped them go as far and as fast as they had.

Surprise wouldn’t do the USA a nickel’s worth of good here. Could a major armored thrust succeed without it? Moss didn’t know. One way or the other, he’d find out. And so would everybody else.

He shot up another artillery position, and a battalion’s worth of infantrymen he caught in the open. He’d pitied the poor foot soldiers in the last war. Their lot was, if anything, worse now. The fighters he and the Confederates were flying now were ever so much more deadly as ground-attack machines than their Great War ancestors had been. Barrels were correspondingly more dangerous, too. Even the poison gas was more poisonous than it had been a generation earlier.