The Grapple (76 page)

“Heavy German bombing raids on Petrograd, Minsk, and Smolensk damaged Russian factories and railroad yards in those cities,” the newsman said. “And the Germans have promised to aid the nationalist uprising in Finland, and say they will recognize the Finnish provisional government.

“As if to counter that German move, the Tsar is appealing to the Russians’ ‘little brothers in the Balkans’—his term—to rebel against Austria-Hungary, whose government he terms ‘unnatural and detested by God.’ In Vienna, the King-Emperor Charles was quoted as saying that if God ever hated any regime, it was surely Russia’s.”

Takes one to know one,
Flora thought.
Yeah, and you know ’em all.
The schoolyard taunts carried more weight when backed up by millions of men and all the munitions two industrialized countries could turn out.

“In western Europe, Germany claims to have begun the liberation of Belgium from British occupation. Prime Minister Churchill says this is utter rubbish, and claims the British Army is merely readjusting its lines. Time will tell.

“German wireless has warned that, if the war continues much longer, England, France, and Russia face what the broadcaster termed ‘unprecedented destruction.’ The French government’s response is too crude to repeat over the air.”

Flora wondered whether the French knew as much as they thought they did. Germany had split the uranium atom before the United States did. The Kaiser could call on an impressive array of nuclear physicists. The United States were getting close to a uranium bomb. Wasn’t it likely the Germans were closer yet?

How close were the Confederate States? That was Flora’s biggest worry. All she knew was what she heard from Franklin Roosevelt, and the Assistant Secretary of War knew less than he wished he did. Flora shook her head. Roosevelt admitted to knowing less than he wished he did. It wasn’t the same thing.

When the newsman started talking about the weather and the football scores, Flora turned off the set. She drank another cup of coffee, did the dishes, called a cab, and went downstairs to wait for it. It showed up in about ten minutes, which was par for the course. The driver held the door open for her.

“Congressional Hall, please,” Flora said as she got in.

“Yes, ma’am.” The man had gray hair and walked with a limp. Flora couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a healthy young man who wasn’t in uniform. Her own son was a healthy young man…and now he was in uniform, too. Maybe the CSA’s uranium bomb wasn’t her biggest worry after all.

The cabby knew the shortest way through the maze of bomb damage that still tied up Philadelphia in the third autumn of the war. Flora gave him a big tip for making good time.

“Thanks a bunch, ma’am.” He tipped his cap.

“Thank
you,
” she said, and got out her ID to show to the guards at the entrance.

“Go on in, Congresswoman,” one of them said—but only after he carefully examined it. When would these painstaking inspections relax? At the end of the war? Ever? The soldier went on, “One of the ladies will finish checking you.”

In front of a blast barricade, a uniformed woman went through Flora’s handbag and briefcase and patted her down. Then she said, “Go ahead.”

“Thank you,” Flora said resignedly. She doubted the new security measures would end with the war. Too many splinter groups would still have causes and people ready to die for them.

She navigated the maze of drab corridors to her office. A good thing no birds flew these hallways; she was often tempted to leave a trail of bread crumbs, and she couldn’t be the only person who was. Her secretary looked up from the typewriter. “Good morning, Congresswoman.”

“Good morning, Bertha.” Flora let herself into her inner office and closed the door behind her. She telephoned Franklin Roosevelt.

“He’s in a meeting, Congresswoman,” Roosevelt’s secretary said. “He should be back in about an hour.”

“Have him call me when he can, please.” Flora had plenty to do while she waited. The paperwork never went away, and the elves never took care of it when she went home at night. And the telephone rang four or five times before it was the Assistant Secretary of War.

“Hello, Flora,” Roosevelt said. “What’s up today?”

“I wondered if you noticed the news item where the Germans warned England and France and Russia about unprecedented destruction,” Flora said. “Does that mean they’re getting close?”

“I missed it,” Roosevelt answered after a thoughtful pause. “I hope someone close to the project heard it. I hope so, but I don’t know, so I’ll pass it along. In case you’re wondering, we haven’t heard a word from the Germans about this yet.”

“I didn’t think we had,” Flora said. If uranium bombs worked the way the people with slide rules thought they would, the postwar world would have two kinds of country in it: the ones with those bombs, which would be powers, and the rest, which…wouldn’t. “That reminds me—any new word about how the Confederates are doing?”

“Nope. I wish there were, but there isn’t,” Franklin Roosevelt said. “Their number one man in this area hasn’t gone anywhere. He’s still right where he was before the war.”

“But they’re still working on it?”

“Well, we sure think so. They know we are—we found that out. They wouldn’t just ignore it themselves.”

“No, they wouldn’t. I wish they would, but no,” Flora said unhappily. “Are they working on it there, then?”

The Assistant Secretary of War paused again. “Don’t know,” he said at last. “We haven’t been able to prove it, not even close, but…. Maybe some people ought to pay a call on them there if they really are. It’s a backwater place, not a lot of targets, so nobody’s gone after it much. Not a lot of obvious targets, I should say. We can probably spare some personnel to find out. Even if the answer is no, we remind more Confederates that they never should have started this war in the first place.”

“Yes.” Flora wondered what her question would end up doing to a backwater place somewhere in the CSA. Some people who’d passed a quiet war would suddenly discover that hell had decided to picnic on their front lawn. She shrugged. If that helped keep Joshua safe, she didn’t care.

C
incinnatus Driver liked the idea of being in Georgia. Georgia was, without a doubt, the deep South. In Kentucky, he’d been right across the border from the USA. Foreign ideas easily wafted south; people said Louisville and Covington were the least Confederate cities in the CSA. Tennessee reminded him of Kentucky, though it seemed…more steeped in the Stars and Bars, perhaps.

But Georgia—Georgia was something else. It was a sign that the United States were really getting somewhere in this war. And it was a scary place for a Negro in the service of the USA to be.

“Ofays here ain’t gonna catch me,” he told a couple of the other truck drivers as they ate supper in a half-wrecked house on the outskirts of Jasper, Georgia, in the hill country north of Atlanta. “I got one bullet I save for me if I’m ever in that kind o’ trouble. Quick and clean is better’n the other way.”

“I guess I can see that,” Hal Williamson said. “White folks around here don’t like you one whole hell of a lot, do they?”

“White folks around here don’t like anything that’s got anything to do with the USA,” Bruce Donovan said. Before Cincinnatus could get mad, he added, “But they especially don’t like colored folks—that’s plain enough.”

“Yeah—ours or their own,” Williamson said.

That made Cincinnatus want to start clobbering white Georgians with his cane…or else to put a clip in his gun and start shooting them. He didn’t think U.S. authorities would arrest him if he did. Odds were they’d just take the gun away from him and send him home. That had temptations of its own, but he thought he did more to hurt the CSA by hauling supplies than he would by murdering a few Confederate civilians.

Williamson lit a Duke, then held out the pack to Cincinnatus and Donovan. After he lit up, he said, “Stories the Negroes tell—man, they’ll curl your hair.”

“Do Jesus!” Cincinnatus said. His hair was already as curly as it could be. He’d seen the same thing in Kentucky and Tennessee and now Georgia: U.S. soldiers were a magnet for the surviving Negroes in the Confederate States. They mostly came in by night; they hid during the day so white Confederates couldn’t finish the job of capturing them and sending them to camps or killing them on the spot.

They were ragged and filthy and skinny, some of them starvation-skinny. They couldn’t tell stories about the camps farther south and west, except to say that people who went in didn’t come out. But they could talk about years on the dodge, scrounging and stealing and hiding. A few talked about whites who protected them for a while. Those stories relieved Cincinnatus; he’d known some decent whites in Covington, and didn’t want to think the Freedom Party had turned all white men in the Confederate States into devils.

Donovan tossed his ration can into a dark corner of the room. The clank it made alarmed all the drivers. You never could tell who was lurking in the dark. Maybe it was a Negro, looking for a new lease on life from the U.S. invaders. Or maybe it was a sniper, a bypassed soldier in butternut or a civilian with a hunting rifle and a grudge against damnyankees.

“What the hell?” To Cincinnatus’ relief, that half challenge came in unmistakable U.S. accents.

“It’s just us. Sorry,” Donovan said, also in tones that could only have been forged north of the Mason-Dixon line.

“Well, watch it. Get your dumb ass shot off if you do shit like that very much.” For all the soldier knew, he was cussing out a general. He didn’t care.

Donovan sighed. He knew he’d been careless, too. He needed a couple of minutes to get back to the subject at hand. When he did speak again, it was much more quietly: “Some of the colored gals who come in, they’re damn good-looking.”

“How come you’re so surprised?” Cincinnatus asked, a certain edge in his voice.

“He musta figured they’d look like you,” Hal Williamson said dryly, which deflated him and set them all laughing.

How many Negro women had Bruce Donovan seen in person before he started driving a truck through the Confederate States? Any? Cincinnatus had no way of knowing. Maybe not. If he came from a small town in the Midwest or the mountains, he might have gone his whole life without running into anybody who wasn’t the same color he was.

Then Donovan and Williamson shared a glance that excluded Cincinnatus. He didn’t call them on it, but he knew what it meant. Some of the colored women coming to the U.S. lines were pathetically anxious to make sure the soldiers in green-gray didn’t turn them back. They had ways to persuade that black men didn’t. Several thunderous bulletins about fraternization and VD had already come down from on high.

When you had to order something more than once, it was a sign people weren’t listening to you. Soldiers
would
screw if they got the chance. Who wouldn’t? And Confederate blacks
were
more likely to carry the clap and syphilis than whites. Who would have bothered treating them, back in the days before the war? Even up in Covington, Cincinnatus knew he might easily have got himself a dose if he hadn’t married young. Plenty of guys he knew had.

“What the hell are we going to do with this country once we get done stomping it flat?” Williamson asked, as if his fellow drivers had an answer that eluded the President of the United States and the Congress in Philadelphia. “Everybody white who stays alive’ll hate our guts. All that means is another war as soon as these assholes get back on their feet.”

“Sure worked that way last time around,” Cincinnatus said.

“Anybody sticks his head up and causes trouble, we got to kill him. Simple as that.” Donovan made it sound simple, anyhow.

“How does that make us any better than Jake Featherston?” Williamson asked.

“I’ll tell you how.” Cincinnatus did have an answer for that. “If you’re black here, you don’t gotta stick your head up. Freedom Party don’t care. They want to kill you any which way. Long as we leave folks who don’t cause trouble alone, we’re miles ahead of them bastards, miles and miles.”

Williamson grunted. “Well, you’re right about that.” He pulled out the pack of cigarettes again, looked at it, and shook his head. “Nah. This’ll keep. I want to grab some shuteye, is what I really want to do.”

“Yeah!” Cincinnatus and Donovan both sounded eager. Cincinnatus always sounded eager for sleep these days. He was working harder than he would have in civilian life, and he wasn’t as young as he had been once upon a time.

His back wouldn’t like sleeping on the floor wrapped in a blanket, with a rolled-up jacket doing duty for a pillow. The rest of him didn’t care at all. He sank into slumber like a submersible slipping below the surface of the sea, and he dove deep.

It was still dark when he woke. For a muzzy moment, he thought another thunderstorm was pummeling northern Georgia. Then he realized this was manmade thunder. Muzzle flashes flickered on the walls of the battered house where he slept. The artillery roared and roared and roared again.

“Gun bunnies are working overtime.” Hal Williamson sounded as drunk with sleep as Cincinnatus felt.

“Hope they blast the shit outa whatever they’re aimin’ at.” Cincinnatus waited for some comment from Donovan. All he heard was a snore. He would have thought this barrage loud enough to wake the dead. Evidently not. A few minutes later, he was asleep again himself. You could get used to damn near anything.

Were the fellow who shook him awake at sunup in the Army, he would have been a top sergeant. The man had a leg gone below the knee and was a couple of years older than Cincinnatus, so he was a civilian, too. But he sure as hell acted like a top kick. “Come on, you lazy bums!” he yelled. “You think the goddamn war’s gonna wait for you to get your beauty rest?”

“Have a heart, Ray,” Cincinnatus groaned—a forlorn hope if ever there was one. But hot coffee and real fried eggs resigned him to being conscious. What the ration cans called scrambled eggs weren’t worth eating, even if the ham that came with them wasn’t too bad.

“Where we going?” Williamson asked as he refilled his tin coffee mug.