The Grapple (77 page)

“Southeast.” Also like a good top sergeant, Ray had all the answers. “Soon as we break out of these fucking chickenshit mountains, get out into the flat country, the Confederates can kiss their sorry ass good-bye. They can’t stop us now. Weather can sometimes, but they can’t. We get down into the flat country, they won’t even slow us down.”

Maybe he was right. Maybe he was wrong. It sounded good to Cincinnatus any which way. The latest depot was only a few hundred yards off. He drove his truck over to it. Soldiers filled the back with heavy wooden crates of artillery ammunition. He liked that. If they needed more shells farther forward, things were going the way they were supposed to.

He didn’t know exactly where the truck convoy was heading. All he had to know was that he was going the same way as the truck in front of him. He shook his head. No, one more thing: if they got bushwhacked, he knew he had to fight back. He had plenty of ammo for the piece on the seat beside him.

But the convoy got through. There’d been more bushwhacking farther north. Here, the Confederates still seemed startled to see Yankee invaders. Cincinnatus feared that wouldn’t last long. If the Confederates could raise hell behind U.S. lines in Kentucky and Tennessee, they could do it here, too.

The gun bunnies were happy to see them. Even though summer was gone and the day was cool, a lot of artillerymen stayed stripped to the waist. “Keep this shit coming, buddy!” said a blond kid with a skull-and-crossbones on his left upper arm. “We’ll blow the whole damn CSA to hell and gone.”

“Sounds good to me,” Cincinnatus answered.

“Yeah, I bet,” the youngster said. “If you could push a button and smash up the country, you’d do it like
that,
I bet.” He snapped his fingers.

“You was in my shoes, wouldn’t you?” Finding a white man who understood what a Negro might be feeling always surprised Cincinnatus.

Then the gun bunny winked at him. “Bet you can keep a secret,” he said. Cincinnatus made a noncommittal noise. The artilleryman went on, “One of my great-great-grandfathers was about the color you are. Maybe we’re cousins, way the hell down the line.”

“Maybe we are.” Cincinnatus kept his voice neutral as he asked, “So you’re passin’, then?” The fellow with the tattoo couldn’t have more than one-sixteenth Negro blood in him: less, probably, since Cincinnatus had some white blood in him. If the gun bunny hadn’t said he was part colored, Cincinnatus never would have guessed.

“Yeah, I’m passing. It’s easier. You’ve got to know that. None of my girlfriends ever knew—that’s for damn sure. And besides, if the government thought I was a nigger, they never would have let me join the Army. And you know what? I want to kick Jake Featherston’s ass just as much as you do.”

“More power to you, then,” Cincinnatus told him. Would the artilleryman’s kids, when he had them, ever find out they were part Negro? And would it be good or bad if they didn’t? Some of each, probably—most things worked out like that. After a moment, Cincinnatus added, “I got me a couple of half-Chinese grandbabies in Des Moines.”

“How about that? Country’s turning into a regular zoo.” The kid grinned. Cincinnatus grinned back. They reached out at the same time and shook hands.

Driving away from the front, Cincinnatus wondered how many people with a thin streak of Negro blood were passing for white in the CSA. As many as could get away with it; he was sure of that. Acting white instead of black made things easier and more convenient in the United States. Down here, it was a matter of life and death.

He rolled past a burnt-out Confederate barrel in a field. U.S. technicians were salvaging what they could from the machine. Four hastily dug graves lay nearby. Cincinnatus nodded to himself. Death wasn’t coming just to Negroes in the CSA. Whites were getting their share, too. “Good,” he muttered, and drove on.

J
ake Featherston stared at the situation maps pinned to the wall of his underground office. He swore under his breath. Despite everything George Patton could do, the abscess in northwestern Georgia was bursting, and damnyankees were spreading all over the landscape. How the hell was the country supposed to hang on to Atlanta? How the hell was it supposed to go on with the war if it couldn’t?

He swore again. He knew the answer to that: uranium bombs. Somehow, the Confederacy had to stand the gaff till they were ready, and to hope like anything the USA didn’t get them first. “Got to hang in,” Featherston said softly. “Got to hang on. Got to.”

A moment later, Lulu poked her head into the office. “Professor FitzBelmont is here to see you, Mr. President,” she said, and sniffed slightly. She didn’t know why the tweedy physics professor was so important to the Confederate States. Jake didn’t think she did, anyhow. Whenever he put something about the uranium-bomb project in writing, he took care of it himself, bypassing her. Security for this couldn’t be too tight. He wouldn’t have let his own shadow know about U-235 if he could have helped it.

All he said now was, “Thanks. Send him in.”

Henderson V. FitzBelmont closed the door behind him. He nodded to Jake. “Mr. President,” he said, and then, belatedly, “Uh—freedom!”

“Freedom!” Jake didn’t get angry at the forced way the professor brought out the slogan, as he would have with most people. He waved him to a chair and asked, “How are you?”

“Sir, I’m alive,” FitzBelmont said wearily as he sat down. “I’m alive, and I’m not hurt. I’ve always tried to be a rational man. I don’t have much use for the idea of miracles. Things are what they are, that’s all. But if anyone wants to say it’s a miracle that I’m here now, I won’t argue with him.”

“I heard Lexington got hit hard,” Featherston said sympathetically. From all the reports he had, Lexington had got one night’s worth of what Richmond took several times a week. “You see what it’s like when you come here. Now you’ve been through it yourself.”

“Seeing it’s one thing. Going through it…” The professor shook his head in stunned disbelief. “How does anybody go through
that
and stay sane?”

“It’s like anything else, Professor—the first time it happens, it’s the worst thing in the world, but when it happens twenty, fifty, a hundred times, it’s just something you’ve got to deal with and go on,” Jake said.

“If they bomb Lexington fifty times, there won’t be anything left,” Henderson FitzBelmont said, horror in his eyes. “There’s not a whole lot left now.”

“Town’s been lucky up till now,” Jake remarked. Off in the Blue Ridge Mountains, without much industry to draw enemy bombers, Lexington had largely escaped the war. The President of the CSA leaned forward. He could think of only one reason bombers would visit Lexington. “How much damage did they do to the project?”

“Well, sir, the works weren’t badly hurt. A lot of bombs hit around them, but not very many on them,” FitzBelmont answered.

“That’s good news!” Jake meant it from the bottom of his heart. The sooner the CSA got uranium bombs, the better—it couldn’t be too soon.

FitzBelmont raised a warning hand. “It’s not so simple, Mr. President. I wish it were. We lost several men who specialized in enriching the uranium we have and extracting element ninety-four from it—jovium, we’re calling that.”

“Wait a minute. Ninety-four? Uranium’s ninety-two, right? What happened to ninety-three?” Jake Featherston could no more become a nuclear physicist than a clam could fly. But he had a devil of a memory for details.

“Element ninety-three—saturnium, we’re calling it right now—doesn’t have an isotope that yields a useful fission product,” FitzBelmont answered.

“It won’t go boom?” Jake Featherston translated academese into English.

“It won’t go boom.” The professor looked pained, but he nodded. “And Martin, Collins, Delancey, and Dean knew more about isolating jovium than anybody else, and the raid killed three of them and left Delancey…well, maimed.” He grimaced. “I saw him afterwards. It’s not pretty.”

Jake had seen a great many horrors in his life. Henderson FitzBelmont probably hadn’t. He looked a little too young to have fought in the Great War. Chances were he didn’t go in for street fighting, either. “How long will he be out?” Featherston asked.

“I don’t know yet, sir. He’s lost a leg and a hand,” FitzBelmont answered. “He won’t be back soon—I can tell you that.”

“Damn!” Jake said. FitzBelmont wasn’t kidding when he said Delancey’d got maimed. “All right, then. Who are your next best people in Lexington? Who can you bring in from somewhere else? The work has to go on, even if you take casualties. That’s part of what war’s all about.”

“I understand that, but physicists are harder to replace than riflemen,” Professor FitzBelmont said stiffly.
So there,
Featherston thought. The professor went on, “Just about everyone in the Confederacy who could help is already in Lexington. There weren’t very many nuclear physicists here to begin with. We might be able to bring in a few men from Tulane. They won’t begin to fill the shoes of the people we lost, though. The ones I mentioned were only the most important.”

“Damn!” Featherston said again. “So that means the Yankees sure as hell know where we’re working on the bomb.” Henderson V. FitzBelmont blinked behind his spectacles. Jake spelled it out for him: “Why the fuck else would they plaster Lexington? Your uranium works is the only thing going on there that matters to the war.”

“How…unfortunate,” FitzBelmont muttered.

“Tell me about it!” Featherston pointed to the situation map. “The country’s in trouble, Professor. If anybody’s got a chance to save it, you’re the man. Whatever you need, we’ll give you.”

“What I need most is time. If you hadn’t sent me packing when I first came to you…”

FitzBelmont had nerve, to remind Jake of his mistakes. The President of the CSA sighed heavily. “Ask me for something I’ve got, dammit. Yeah, I was wrong. There. You happy? Not many people ever heard me say that, and you better believe it. But I thought you were selling me snake oil. Can you blame me? It sounded too fantastic to be true. Still does, but I reckon it is.”

“Yes, sir, it is. The United States think so, too,” FitzBelmont said, which made Jake wince. The physicist went on, “If the Yankees hit us once in Lexington, aren’t they likely to do it again? We may take more damage the next time around.”

“I’ve already pulled four antiaircraft batteries away from Richmond and sent ’em west,” Jake said. “I’ve pulled two wings of night fighters, too. We’ll get hit harder here, but we can live with that. We can’t live without you. I didn’t want to do anything special about Lexington before. If we had all kinds of defenses around a no-account little college town, the United States’d be bound to wonder why. Well, now the damnyankees know why, so we’ll do everything we can to hold ’em back.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.” FitzBelmont hesitated, then asked his question: “What do you think the odds are?”

“Not as good as I wish they were.” Featherston wanted to lie, but feared the USA would show he was lying in short order. “We can make hitting Lexington expensive for them. I know that for a fact. I can’t promise we’ll keep everything off you. How much time would you lose if you packed up and went somewhere else?”

“A good deal. Several weeks, anyhow—maybe months.” Henderson V. FitzBelmont eyed the map to which Jake had pointed. “Besides, where would we go?”

That was a much better question than the President wished it were. With airstrips in southern Tennessee, the United States could strike most of the Confederate heartland. “Miami? Houston? Habana? Those look like about your three best choices.”

By the expression on FitzBelmont’s face, he liked none of them. Neither did Jake Featherston. But he didn’t like leaving the facility where it was, either.
The devil and the deep blue sea,
he thought. Yet the devil lurked
in
the deep blue sea. U.S. submersibles prowled the Confederate coast. If they sank a ship with the uranium project aboard, they sank the CSA, too.

“How much of your work can you move underground?” he asked. “That’ll give the damnyankees a harder time, anyhow.”

“It will also involve delay.” But Professor FitzBelmont looked thoughtful. “With reinforced concrete above it, perhaps…”

“You need concrete? I’ll give you concrete till it’s coming out your ass,” Jake said. “And we’ll give the Yankees something new to think about pretty soon, too.”

“May I ask what?” The professor was starting to get the hang of security.

Normally, Jake wouldn’t have said boo, but he needed something to buck up FitzBelmont’s spirits—and his own. He made the rules. He could break them. “Yeah,” he said. “We’ve got us a project down in Huntsville, too. Pretty soon—any day now, matter of fact—we’ll be able to fire rockets with a ton of TNT in the nose a couple of hundred miles into Yankeeland. Let’s see ’em try and stop those, by God!”

“That would help. I can see as much. How accurate are they?”

“They can hit a city. They can’t hit a city block.” Jake stabbed a finger out at Professor FitzBelmont. “How heavy will your uranium bomb be? Put one of those in a rocket and it’d be the perfect weapon, near enough.”

“Calculations are still theoretical. The best estimate is on the close order of ten tons,” FitzBelmont answered.

“Shit!” Jake said feelingly. “Need bigger rockets or smaller bombs. Which do you reckon I could get first?”

“Since we don’t have any bomb at all yet, getting larger rockets would seem easier,” the professor said.

“Makes sense,” the President of the CSA agreed. “I’ll tell the boys in Huntsville to get on it, and pronto. Damnyankees haven’t sniffed them out yet, so they can work without having the sky fall on ’em.” He muttered under his breath. “Only a matter of time, probably. Spies everywhere. Everywhere, I tell you.” He made himself brighten. It wasn’t easy. “Wouldn’t that be something, though? A rocket big enough to throw a uranium bomb all the way to San Francisco and Seattle?”

“That would be…remarkable,” FitzBelmont said. “Of course, a just peace would be even better.”

“I offered the United States a just peace two years ago,” Featherston said angrily. His definition of
just
boiled down to
just what I want.
“They wouldn’t take it, the bastards. I figured we’d better grind it out of ’em, then, on account of they sure aimed to grind it out of us.”