Return Engagement

by Harry Turtledove

  Scott staring after him, he drove the truck into Alexandria. He was glad traffic was light. He'd never tried handling anything so big, and he wasn't used to a gearshift with five forward speeds instead of the usual three. But he didn't hit anything, and he wasn't grinding the gears when he shifted nearly so much by the time he got where he was going: a garage named Halliday's, on the outskirts of town.

  Stuart Halliday was a compact man with battered, clever hands. "What can I do for you, buddy?" he asked when Jeff descended from the truck.

  Jeff told him what he wanted, finishing, "Can you handle it?"

  The mechanic rubbed his chin. "Sheet metal all the way around there . . . Gasketing on the doors . . ."

  "Gotta be sturdy sheet metal," Pinkard said.

  "Yeah, I heard you." Halliday thought for a little while, then nodded. "Yeah, I can do it. Set you back two hundred and fifty bucks."

  "I'll give you one seventy-five," Jeff said. They haggled good-naturedly for a little while before settling on two and a quarter. Jeff asked, "How soon can you let me have it?"

  "Be about a week." Halliday sent Pinkard a curious look. "What the hell you want it like that for?"

  "Camp business," Jeff answered. If the snoopy garage man couldn't work it out for himself, that was all to the good. Then Pinkard coughed. In all of this, he hadn't figured in one thing. "Uh–you give me a lift back to camp?"

  Halliday carefully didn't smile. "Why, sure."

  When Jeff came back without the truck, Mercer Scott sent him a stare full of hard suspicion. He didn't care. He knew what he was doing, or thought he did. Over the week, while Halliday was overhauling the truck, he made a few preparations of his own. Till he saw how this would go, he intended to play his cards close to his chest.

  He paid Halliday when the mechanic delivered the revised and edited machine. He used camp money. If the thing didn't work, he'd pay it back out of his own pocket. Halliday stuffed brown banknotes into his coveralls. "I left that one hole, like you said," he told Jeff. "I don't understand it, not when the rest is pretty much airtight, but I did it."

  "You got paid for doin' the work," Jeff answered. "You didn't get paid for understanding."

  One of Halliday's kids drove him away from Camp Dependable. Unlike Jeff, he'd thought ahead. After he was gone, Jeff did some of his own work on the truck. He drew a small crowd of guards. Most of them hung around for a while, then went off shrugging and shaking their heads.

  Mercer Scott watched like a hawk. Suddenly, he exclaimed, "You son of a bitch! You son of a bitch! You reckon it'll work?"

  Pinkard looked up from fitting a length of pipe to the hole that had puzzled Stuart Halliday. "I don't know," he said, "but I aim to find out."

  "Chick Blades ought to get a promotion for giving you the idea," Scott said. "Goddamn shame he's too dead to appreciate it."

  "Yeah." Jeff examined his handiwork. Slowly, he nodded to himself. "That ought to do it. Now I'll just announce a transfer to another camp. . . ."

  Getting Negroes to volunteer to hop into the truck was so easy, it almost embarrassed him. The hardest part was picking and choosing among them. They knew that when they got shackled together and marched out into the swamp, they weren't coming back. But a transfer to another camp had to be an improvement. Maybe there wouldn't be population reductions somewhere else.

  Pinkard drove the truck himself that first time. It was his baby. He wanted to see how it went. He closed the gasketed doors behind the Negroes who'd got in. The lock and bar to keep those doors closed were good and solid. Halliday hadn't skimped. Jeff would have skinned the mechanic alive if he had.

  He started up the engine and drove out of camp. It wasn't long before the Negroes realized exhaust fumes were filling their compartment. They started shouting–screaming–and pounding on the metal walls. Jeff drove and drove. After a while, the screams subsided and the pounding stopped. He drove a little longer after that, just to be on the safe side.

  When he was satisfied things had worked out the way he'd hoped, he took a road that the prisoners had built into the swamp. Mercer Scott and half a dozen guards waited at the end of it. Jeff got out of the cab and walked around to the back of the truck. "Well, let's see what we've got," he said, and opened the rear doors.

  "By God, you did it," Scott said.

  The Negroes inside were dead, asphyxiated. All the guards had to do was take them out and throw them in a hole in the ground. Well, almost all. One of the men held his nose and said, "Have to hose it down in there before you use it again."

  "Reckon you're right," Jeff said. But he was just about happy enough to dance a jig. No fuss, no muss–well, not too much–no bother. Guards wouldn't have to pull the trigger again and again and again. They wouldn't have to see what they were doing at all. They'd just have to . . . drive.

  And, best of all, the Negroes inside Camp Dependable wouldn't know what was happening. Their pals who got in the truck were going to another camp, weren't they? Sure they were. Nobody expected them to come back.

  Mercer Scott came up and set a hand on Pinkard's shoulder. "You know how jealous I am of you? You got any idea? Christ, I'd've given my left nut to come up with something so fine."

  "It really did work, didn't it?" Jeff said. "You know what? I reckon maybe I will try and bump poor Chick up a grade or two. It'd make his missus' pension a little bigger."

  Scott gave him a sly look. "She'd be right grateful for that. Not a bad-lookin' woman, not a bit. Maybe I oughta be jealous of you twice."

  Jeff hadn't thought of it like that. Now that he did, he found himself nodding. She'd been haggard and in shock at the funeral, but still. . . . Business first, though. "Other thing I'm gonna do," he said, "is I'm gonna call Richmond, let 'em know about this. They been tellin' me stuff all along. By God, it's my turn now."

  ****

  FERDINAND KOENIG strode into Jake Featherston's office in the Gray House. The Attorney General was a big, bald, burly man with a surprisingly light, high voice. "Good to see you, Ferd. Always good to see you," Jake said, and stuck out his hand. Koenig squeezed it. They went back to the very beginnings of the Freedom Party. Koenig had backed Jake at the crucial meeting that turned it into his party. He came as close to being a friend as any man breathing; Jake had meant every word of his greeting. Now he asked, "What's on your mind?"

  "Head of one of the camps out in Louisiana, fellow named Pinkard, had himself a hell of a good idea," Koenig said.

  "I know about Pinkard–reliable man," Jake said. "Joined the Party early, stayed in when we were in trouble. Wife ran around on him, poor bastard. Went down to fight in Mexico, and not many who weren't in the hard core did that."

  Koenig chuckled. "I could've named a lot of people in slots like that–slots lower down, too–and you'd know about them the same way."

  "Damn right I would. I make it my business to know stuff like that," Featherston said. The more you knew about somebody, the better you could guess what he'd do next–and the easier you could get your hooks into him, if you ever had to do that. "So what's Pinkard's idea?"

  "He's . . . got a whole new way of looking at the population-reduction problem," Koenig said.

  Jake almost laughed out loud at that. Even a tough customer like Ferd Koenig had trouble calling a spade a spade. Jake knew what he aimed to do. Koenig wanted to do the same thing. The only difference was, Ferd didn't like talking about it. He–and a bunch of other people–were like a hen party full of maiden ladies tiptoeing around the facts of life.

  The laugh came out as an indulgent smile. "Tell me about it," Jake urged. Koenig did. Featherston listened intently. The longer the Attorney General talked, the harder Jake listened. He leaned forward till his chair creaked, as if to grab Koenig's words as fast as they came out. When the other man finished, Jake whistled softly. "This could be big, Ferd. This could be really, really big."

  "I was thinking the same thing," Koenig said.

  "A fleet of trucks like that, they'd be easy to build�
��cheap, too," Featherston said. "How much you tell me it cost Pinkard to fix that one up?"

  Koenig had to check some notes he pulled from a breast pocket. "He paid . . . let me see . . . $225 for the sheet-metal paneling, plus another ten bucks for the pipe. He did the work with that himself–didn't want the mechanic figuring out what was going on."

  "He is a smart fellow," Featherston said approvingly. "We get a fleet of those bastards made, we're out of the retail business and we go into wholesale." Now he did laugh–he was wondering what Saul Goldman would say to that. But he got back to business in a hurry. "Shooting people in the head all day–that's hard work. A lot of men can't take it."

  "That's what Pinkard said. He said this guard named"–Koenig glanced at the notes again–"named Blades killed himself with car exhaust, and that's what gave him the idea. He asked if Blades' widow could get a bigger pension on account of this turned out to be so important."

  "Give it to her," Jake said at once. "Pinkard's right. Like I say, shooting people's hard work. It wears on you. It'd be harder still if you were shootin' gals and pickaninnies. But, hell, you load 'em in a truck, drive around for a while, and the job's taken care of–anybody can do that, anybody at all. Get a 'dozer to dig a trench, dump the bodies in, and get on back for the next load."

  "You've got it all figured out." Koenig laughed, but more than a little nervously.

  "Bet your ass I do," Featherston said. "This is part of what we've been looking for. We've always known what we were going to do, but we haven't found the right way to go about it. This here may not be the final solution, but we're sure as hell gettin' closer. You get to work on it right away. Top priority, you hear me?"

  "How many trucks you reckon we'll need?" Koenig asked.

  "Beats me," Jake said. "Find some bright young fella with one o' them slide rules to cipher it out for you. However many it is, you get 'em. I don't give a damn what you got to do–you get 'em."

  "If it's too many, the Army may grumble," Koenig warned.

  "Listen, Ferd, you leave the Army to me," Featherston said, his voice suddenly hard. "I said top priority, and I meant it. You get those trucks."

  He hardly ever spoke to Ferd Koenig as superior to inferior. When he did, it hit hard. "Right, boss," the Attorney General mumbled. Jake nodded to himself. When he gave an order, that was what people were supposed to say.

  After some hasty good-byes, Koenig all but fled his office. Featherston wondered if he'd hit too hard. He didn't want to turn the last of his old comrades into an enemy. Have to pat him on the fanny, make sure his feelings aren't hurt too bad, he thought. He cared about only a handful of people enough for their feelings to matter to him. Ferd Koenig probably topped the list.

  Lulu stepped in. "The Vice President is here to see you, sir."

  "Thank you, dear," Featherston said. His secretary smiled and ducked back out. She was also one of the people whose feelings he cared about.

  Don Partridge, on the other hand . . . The Vice President of the CSA was an amiable nonentity from Tennessee. He had a big, wide smile, boyishly handsome good looks, and not a hell of a lot upstairs. That suited Jake just fine. Willy Knight had been altogether too much like him, and he'd barely survived the assassination attempt Knight put together. Well, the son of a bitch was dead now, and he'd had a few years in hell before he died, too. I pay everybody back, Jake thought. The United States were finding out about that. So were the Negroes in the Confederate States, and they'd find out more soon. Have to do something nice for that Pinkard fellow . . .

  Jake worried about no coups from Don Partridge. Not having to worry about him was why he was Vice President. "Well, Don, what's on your mind?" he asked. Not a hell of a lot, he guessed.

  "Got a joke for you," Partridge said. He went ahead and told it. Like a lot of his jokes, it revolved around a dumb farm girl. This time, she wanted to make a little record to send to her boyfriend at the front, but she didn't have the money to pay the man at the studio in town. ". . . and he said,, ‘Get down on your knees and take it out of my pants." So she did., ‘Take hold of it,' he said, and she did. And then he said,, ‘Well, go ahead." And she said, ‘Hello, Freddie . . ." "

  Partridge threw back his head and guffawed. Jake laughed, too. Unlike a lot of the jokes Don Partridge told, that one was actually funny. "Pretty good," Jake said. "What else is going on?"

  "That's what I wanted to ask you, Mr. President," Partridge said. He knew better than to get too familiar with Jake. "You've got me out making speeches about how well everything's going, and sometimes folks ask when the war's going to be over. I'd like to know what to tell 'em."

  He was earnest. He didn't want to do the wrong thing. He also had to know Featherston would come down on him like a thousand-pound bomb if he did. Jake didn't mind being feared, not even a little bit. He said, "You tell 'em it's Al Smith's fault we're still fighting. I offered a reasonable peace. I offered a just peace. He wouldn't have it. So we'll just have to keep knocking him over the head till he sees sense."

  "Yes, sir. I understand that." Don Partridge nodded eagerly. "Knocking the damnyankees over the head is important. I know it is." He stuck out his chin and tried to look resolute. With his big, cowlike eyes, it didn't come off too well. "But the trouble is, sometimes the Yankees hit back, and people don't much like that."

  "I don't like it, either," Jake said, which was a good-sized understatement even for him. "We're doing everything we can. As long as we hang in there, we'll lick 'em in the end. That's what you've got to let the people know."

  The Vice President nodded. "I'll do it, sir! You can count on me."

  "I do, Don." I count on you to stay out of my hair and not cause me any trouble. There are plenty of things you're not too good at, but you can manage that.

  "I'm so glad, sir." Partridge gave Jake one of his famous smiles. From what some of the Freedom Party guards said, those smiles got him lady friends–or more than friends–from one end of the CSA to the other. This one, aimed at a man older than he was, had a smaller impact.

  "Anything else I can do for you?" Featherston didn't quite tell Partridge to get the hell out of there, but he didn't miss by much. The Vice President took the hint and left, which he wouldn't have if Jake had made it more subtle.

  He's a damn fool, Featherston thought, but even damn fools have their uses. That's something I didn't understand when I was younger. One thing he understood now was that he couldn't afford to let the damnyankees kill him before he'd won the war. He tried to imagine Don Partridge as President of the Confederate States. When he did, he imagined victory flying out the window. Damn fools had their uses, but running things wasn't one of them.

  Featherston looked at a clock on the wall, then at a map across from it. He'd got Partridge out early; his next appointment wasn't for another twenty minutes. It was with Nathan Bedford Forrest III. The general was no fool. Railing against the Whigs, Jake had cussed them for being the party of Juniors and IIIs and IVs, people who thought they ought to have a place on account of what their last name was. Say what you would about Forrest, but he wasn't like that.

  He came bounding into the President's office. He didn't waste time with hellos. Instead, he pointed to the map. "Sir, we're going to have a problem, and we're going to have it pretty damn quick."

  "The one we've seen coming for a while now?" Jake asked.

  Nathan Bedford Forrest III nodded. "Yes, sir." His face was wider and fleshier than that of his famous ancestor, but you could spot the resemblance in his eyes and eyebrows . . . and the first Nathan Bedford Forrest had had some of the deadliest eyes anybody'd ever seen. His great-grandson (the name had skipped a generation) continued, "The damnyankees have seen what we did in Ohio. Looks like they're getting ready to try the same thing here. After all, it's not nearly as far from the border to Richmond as it is from the Ohio River up to Lake Erie."

  "Like you say, we've been looking for it," Featherston replied. "We've been getting ready for it, too. How much blood do the
y want to spend to get where they aim to go? We'll give 'em a Great War fight, only more so. And by God, even if they do take Richmond, they haven't hurt us half as bad as what we did to them farther west."

  "I aim to try to keep that from happening," Forrest said. "I think I can. I hope I can. And you're right about the other. What we've done to them will make it harder for them to do things to us. But we're going to have a hell of a fight on our hands, Mr. President. You need to know that. Life doesn't come with a guarantee."

  "I haven't backed down from a fight yet," Jake said. "I don't aim to start now."

  XIII

  ON THE shelf. Abner Dowling hated it. Oh, they hadn't thrown him out of the Army altogether, as he'd feared they might. But he was back in the War Department in Philadelphia, doing what should have been about a lieutenant colonel's job. That was what he got for letting Ohio fall.

  He'd been George Armstrong Custer's adjutant for what seemed like forever (of course, any time with Custer seemed like forever). He'd been a reasonably successful military governor in Utah and Kentucky. These days, Utah was in revolt and Kentucky belonged to the CSA, but none of that was his fault.

  Then they'd finally given him a combat command–but not enough barrels or airplanes to go with it. He hadn't done a bang-up job with what he had. Looking back, he could see he'd made mistakes. But he was damned if he could see how anyone but an all-knowing superman could have avoided some of those mistakes. They'd seemed like good ideas at the time. Hindsight said they hadn't been, but who got hindsight ahead of time?

  Dowling swore under his breath and tried to unsnarl a logistics problem. Right this minute, the war effort was nothing but logistics problems. That was the Confederacy's fault. Getting from east to west–or, more urgently at the moment, from west to east–was fouled up beyond all recognition. Everybody thought he deserved to go first, and nobody figured he ought to wait in line.