The Grapple (68 page)

“Well, all right, Mr. President.” By the way Patton said it, it wasn’t. It didn’t come close. Gathering himself, the general asked, “What have you got for us, then?”

“New rockets. These babies can reach way the hell up into Tennessee from here, maybe even into Kentucky,” Jake said. “They aren’t
real
accurate yet, but they’ll let us shoot at things we haven’t been able to touch for a while. They’re better than bombers, that’s for sure—we don’t lose a whole crew of trained men whenever one fails.”

“I hope they help.” Patton sounded less delighted than Featherston hoped he would. Most generals—most officers, come to that—were stick-in-the-muds. Jake had seen as much during the Great War. After he took over, he’d tried to get rid of as much dead wood as he could. But he couldn’t retire or shoot the whole Confederate officer corps, no matter how tempting the idea was.

He could put Patton in his place, though. “What’s this I hear about you slapping an enlisted man around?”

“Yes, sir, I did that, and I’d damn well do it again.” Patton had the courage of his convictions, anyhow. “The yellow coward wouldn’t go forward after a direct order. He blathered about combat fatigue. What nonsense!” He spat with magnificent contempt. “I would have got him moving, too—hell with me if I wouldn’t—if not for some near-mutineers. I hope the Yankees killed the lot of them when they overran Chattanooga. Some good would come from the loss in that case.”

“General, I don’t like slackers. Nobody does. But I’ve seen shellshock. Some men do break,” Jake said. “When I took the oath in 1934, I promised that soldiers would get a square deal from their officers. Christ knows I didn’t last time around. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt—once. But if I hear about anything like this again, you’ll have dug yourself one goddamn deep hole. You got that?”

“You always make yourself very plain, Mr. President.” Patton plainly didn’t like it.

Too bad,
Jake thought. Had they promoted him to lieutenant for scenting the Negro uprising of 1915, he probably never would have become President of the CSA. The boiling resentment he still felt at being passed over fueled his rise to power.

A young officer came up to the President and the general. Saluting nervously, the kid said, “Sir—uh, sirs—Y-ranging reports Yankee airplanes on the way. You might want to think about getting under cover, in case they decide to unload on us up here near the front.”

“Y-ranging,” Jake muttered. That was one more place where the USA had the jump on the CSA. If not for some quiet help from Britain, the Confederacy might still be without it. But he nodded to the kid and to Patton. “Come on, General. No phony heroics today. The country needs us, and we’d better stay alive.”

“What do you mean, ‘phony heroics’?” Patton asked as the junior officer led them to a well-reinforced bombproof. “Some men even of high rank are fond of fighting at the front. In my opinion, that is as it should be.”

“Not if they throw their lives away to do it,” Jake said. “We can’t afford gestures like that, not in the spot we’re in. You don’t see me going right up to the front any more, do you? You reckon I don’t want to?”

Patton might have wanted to make a comment or two along those lines. Whatever he wanted, he didn’t do it. Featherston’s record for fighting up near the front all through the Great War spoke for itself. And, when things were going better, he’d already served the guns this time around. You could say a lot of things about him—he knew the things his enemies did say. But the only way you could call him yellow was to lie through your teeth.

Bombs started thudding home a few minutes after Jake and Patton went to the shelter. Dirt pattered down between the planks that shored up the ceiling. Kerosene lamps lit the bombproof. Their flames wavered and jerked when bombs hit close. Once, the junior officer moved one of them back from the edge of the table on which it sat. Jake didn’t get the feeling he was in any great danger, not down here.

“How long you think this’ll go on?” he asked the kid.

“Twenty minutes to a half hour, sir, if it’s the usual kind of raid.”

“They’re trying to wear us down,” Patton said.

They were doing a pretty damn good job of it, too. Jake held that thought to himself. If Patton couldn’t see it for himself, he didn’t need to hear it. “What will the Yankees be doing up top?” Featherston asked the youngster.

“Maybe some raids to grab prisoners and squeeze them.” The officer looked unhappy. “We lost a machine-gun nest like that last week. But they may just sit tight and let the airplanes pound on us.”

“How many do we usually shoot down when they come over like this?”

“A few. Not enough. The antiaircraft guns do what they can, but we really need fighters to make the enemy pay.”

“We need more fighter pilots, too,” Patton said. “Some of the kids who get into Hound Dogs these days…don’t have enough practice before they do. Let’s put it that way. If they live through their first few missions, they learn enough to do all right. But a lot of them don’t, and that costs a man and a machine.”

“I know. Ciphering out what to do about it’s not so easy, though,” Jake said. “If we slow down the training program, the pilots pick up more experience, but we don’t get ’em soon enough to do us much good. If we rush ’em, they’re still green when they come out. Like you say, General, the ones who live do learn.”

“Sometimes they get killed anyway, uh, sir,” the junior officer said. “The damnyankees just have too many airplanes.”

Featherston glared at him. He didn’t like being reminded of that. And, since the front had moved south, Confederate bombers weren’t hitting U.S. factories so hard. The ones out in California and the Pacific Northwest, which the CSA could hardly hit at all, were also making their weight felt. In a war of production, the United States had the edge—and they were using it.

After a little more than half an hour, the bombs stopped falling. “Let’s get up there and see what the hell they did to us this time,” Jake said.

They’d turned the area into one of the less pleasant suburbs of hell, that was what. Craters pocked the red earth. Smoke rose here and there from fires the bombs had set. Several motorcars lay flipped over onto one side or on their roofs. Stretcher bearers and ambulances took casualties back to aid stations. The wounded men groaned or screamed, depending on how badly hurt they were. Nobody shouted, “Freedom!”

Biting his lip, Featherston said, “It’s a bastard, isn’t it?”

“Can’t fight a war without casualties, sir,” Patton said.

“I know that,” Jake said impatiently—he couldn’t let the general think he’d found a weak spot. “But I didn’t reckon they could do so much damage so quick. What if they did push through after an air raid like that? Could we stop ’em?”

He watched Patton pick his response with care. Patton, after all, was the general whose flank attack through the mountains hadn’t driven the USA out of Tennessee and Kentucky, and the general who hadn’t held Chattanooga when it desperately needed holding. “Sir, we’d make it mighty warm for them,” Patton said at last.

That meant he didn’t know. Jake had no trouble reading between the lines. “If they break out again, we’re in a lot of trouble. A
lot
of trouble, you hear me?”

“We’re doing everything we can with what we’ve got,” Patton said. “That’s the Lord’s truth. If you can pull any more rabbits out of your hat, I’d love to have ’em. Maybe those rockets you talked about will do some good. I hope so. But if there’s anything bigger, I sure want to get my hands on it as quick as I can.”

Jake thought of Professor FitzBelmont and his team at Washington University. He could still win—the CSA could still win—if they got their uranium bomb built faster than the damnyankees did. If the USA beat them to that punch…Well, if that happened, a breakout in Georgia wouldn’t matter any more.

“I may have something for you, General, but I don’t know when yet,” Featherston said. “When you get it, though, it’ll be a humdinger.”

Patton looked northwest. “Sir, it had better be,” he said.

F
lora Blackford smiled whenever she got a letter from Joshua. That wasn’t often enough to suit her—two a day wouldn’t have been enough to suit her—but he did write two or three times a week, when he found the chance and wasn’t too tired. Camp Pershing was in upstate New York, between Rochester and Syracuse. To Flora, that was the back of beyond. Joshua liked the weather. How he’d like it when September turned to November and then to January was liable to be another story.

He even liked the food in the mess halls, which was a truly alarming thought. By what Flora gathered from his letters, they fried everything and let him eat as much as he wanted. To an eighteen-year-old, that made a pretty good start on heaven.

He wrote about how they were whipping him into shape, and how he was stronger and faster than he’d ever been. They were turning him into the best kind of killer they knew how to manufacture. Part of Flora hated that—she didn’t want him conscripted at all. But if he had to wear the green-gray uniform, shouldn’t he be a fit, well-trained soldier? Wouldn’t that give him the best chance of coming home in one piece?

She wished she hadn’t thought of it that way. She wished she didn’t have to think of it that way. As a Congresswoman, as a President’s widow, her wishes usually came true. Not the ones that had to do with Joshua, not any more. He had wishes of his own, and the will to thwart her. He had them, and he used them, and she had to pray his enthusiastic patriotism didn’t get him killed.

The next morning, someone blew himself up while Flora was on her way in to the battered hall where Congress met in Philadelphia. The blast was only a couple of blocks away, and made the taxi’s window rattle.
“Gottenyu!”
she exclaimed. “Was that what I’m afraid it was?”

“I think so, ma’am.” The driver was close to sixty, and one of the hands he put on the wheel was a two-pronged hook. “Those crazy bastards don’t know when to quit.”

“You don’t even know who it was,” Flora said.

“Do I need to?” he returned. “Whoever’d strap on explosives and push the button’s gotta be nuts, right?”

“You’d hope so.” But Flora wasn’t so sure. Apparently rational, cold-blooded groups were starting to use people bombs for a very basic reason: they worked. Nothing else disrupted life the way they did. Every time you got on a bus, you looked at all the other passengers, wondering if you could spot the one about to martyr himself—or herself—for the sake of a Cause. And those other people were looking at you, wondering if you were that one.

A Mormon unhappy with the truce terms? A Confederate agent who’d got close to somebody Jake Featherston wanted dead before pushing the button? Somebody with a personal grievance and access to explosives? A genuine nut? She wouldn’t know till she heard over the wireless or read the answer in the paper.

She tipped the driver heavily when he dropped her off. “Thank you, ma’am, but you don’t have to do that,” he said.

“I didn’t do it because I had to. I did it because I wanted to,” she told him.

He touched the hook to the patent-leather brim of his cap. “Mighty kind of you,” he said, and drove off.

Kind? Flora doubted it. She’d given him extra money not least because cabs like his saved her from worrying about the other passengers on a bus. That was less egalitarian than it should have been, but she couldn’t make herself feel very guilty about it. She didn’t want to get blown up, and that was that.

She had to show her ID to get into the building. Before she could get past the entrance hall, a burly guard checked her purse and briefcase and a policewoman patted her down. By the woman’s smirk, she enjoyed it the way a man might have. Flora didn’t know what could be done about that, either. Nothing, probably.

She hurried to the room where the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War was meeting. Several Senators and Congressmen were already there. “Morning, Flora,” one of them said. “We pounded the, uh, crud out of Atlanta last night, if half of what they say on the wireless is true.”

“Good,” Flora replied. About half of what they said on the wireless usually was true.

“You all right?” the Congressman asked. “You look a little poorly.” Foster Stearns was a granite-ribbed Democrat from New Hampshire: a reactionary, a class enemy, and a good fellow. One of the things Flora had found in Congress was that the people on the other side of the aisle didn’t have horns and a tail. They were just people, no worse and no better than Socialists, and as sincere about what they believed.

“I’ve been better,” Flora said. “I heard a people bomb—I’m pretty sure that’s what it was—go off when I was coming in.”

“Oh!” everybody exclaimed. Foster Stearns pulled out a chair and made her sit down. Somebody—she didn’t see who—gave her a paper cup. She took a big swig, thinking it was water. It turned out to be straight gin, and almost went down the wrong pipe. She managed to swallow before she had to cough. She wasn’t used to straight gin right after breakfast—or any other time. But the swig seemed to help. She was less upset afterwards than she had been before.

More committee members came in. They knew about the bomb, too. “Took out quite a few folks, the miserable son of a bitch,” one of them said, and then, “Excuse me, Flora.”

“It’s all right,” Flora answered. “That’s not half what I think of him.”

“Are we all here? Shall we get started?” A Senator and a Congressman asked the same thing at the same time.

Along with everybody else, Flora looked around the conference room. Robert Taft wasn’t there. And that meant something was wrong. They should have convened five minutes earlier, at nine on the dot. He was always on time, as reliable as the sunrise. “Somebody call his apartment,” Flora said.

Somebody went outside to do that, and came back a couple of minutes later. “His wife says he left forty-five minutes ago. He was walking in—trying to lose ten pounds.” More than one committee member chuckled, remembering his rotund father.

Flora knew where Taft lived—much closer to Congressional Hall than she did. And she could make a pretty good guess about how he would have come here. When she did, she gasped in dismay. “I hope I’m wrong,” she said, “but…”