“Towns are all very well. Towns are better than all very well, matter of fact,” Jake said. “But there’s still the core of the cotton country—from South Carolina through Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi into Louisiana. We thinned that out some when we brought in harvesters—got a bunch of niggers off the farms and into towns where we could deal with ’em easier.”
“Got a bunch of ’em with rifles in their hands, too,” Ferdinand Koenig said dryly. “They didn’t have work anymore, so they reckoned they might as well go out and start shooting white folks.”
He wasn’t wrong, but Featherston said, “We had trouble with ’em before that, too,” which was also true. He went on, “That whole goddamn Black Belt’s been up in arms ever since the Great War. Damn Whigs never were able to put it down all the way, and we’ve had our own fun and games with it. Plenty of places down there where it’s never been safe for a white man to go around by himself in broad daylight, let alone after the sun goes down.”
“That’s only part of the problem,” Koenig said. “In towns, you can put barbed wire around the nigger district, and after that you can go in and clean it out one chunk at a time, however you want to. The niggers in the countryside, you can’t cordon ’em off so easy. They just slip away. It’s like trying to scoop up water with a sieve.”
“Gotta keep working on it,” Jake said.
The Attorney General’s jowls wobbled as he nodded. “Oh, hell, I know that,” he said. “But the real trouble is, it takes a lot of manpower, and we haven’t got a lot of people to spare, not the way things are going.”
“I know, I know.” Featherston reached for the whiskey bottle again. More heat trickled down his throat. He’d been so certain he could knock the USA out of the war in a hurry. He’d been so certain—and he’d been so wrong. Soldiers at the front were more important than anything else, even people to help round up the niggers. After yet another swig, he added, “Those trucks that Pinkard came up with can’t handle all the volume we need for this operation, either.”
“They’re the best we’ve got,” Koenig said. “And we don’t have guards eating their guns all the goddamn time anymore, either, the way we did before we started using them.”
“I know that, too, dammit,” Jake said impatiently. “We need something better, though—and no, I don’t know what it is any more than you do. But something. We’ve got to get rid of those niggers in great big old lots.”
“You can figure out damn near anything if you throw enough money and enough smart people at it,” Ferd Koenig observed. “Is this worth throwing ’em at it? Or do we need the people and the money more somewhere else?”
“This is what we spent all that time wandering in the wilderness for,” Jake said, as if he were Moses leading the CSA to the Promised Land. That was exactly how he felt, too. “If we don’t do this, we’re letting the country down.”
“Well, all right.” Koenig nodded again. “I feel the same way, but I needed to make sure you did. We can do that—you know we can. But it’ll likely mean pulling those people and that money away from the war effort.”
“This is the war effort,” Jake Featherston declared. “What else would you call it? This is what counts.” Even as he spoke, he heard the rumble of U.S. artillery fire, not nearly far enough to the north. He nodded anyway. “We clean out the coons, we’ll do something for this country that’ll last till the end of time.”
“All right, then. We’ll tend to it.” Koenig sighed. “I wish we had as many people as the Yankees do. They can afford to keep more balls in the air at the same time than we can.”
“I don’t care about their balls in the air. Those aren’t the ones I aim to kick,” Jake said.
“Heh,” Ferd Koenig said. “Well, I hope we can do it, that’s all.” He was listening to the gunfire from the north, too. He didn’t brush it aside the way Jake did. It worried him, and he made no secret about that, not even to Featherston.
Showing what he thought took nerve. Lesser men had ended up in camps for lesser offenses. But regardless of whether Koenig agreed with Jake’s policies, his personal loyalty was unshakable. Jake could count the people he fully trusted on his fingers—sometimes, on a bad day, on his thumbs—but Ferd always had been, was, and always would be one of them.
“We will.” Featherston retained his conviction in his own destiny. “The show will be starting soon, and we’ll squash ’em flat. You’ll see.”
“Expect I will.” Koenig didn’t say one way or the other. He didn’t even leave it hanging in the air. He believed in Jake’s destiny, too. He’d gone on believing in it through the black years in the middle twenties, when so many others wrote Jake and the Freedom Party off. He asked, “You need me for anything else?”
“Don’t think so,” Jake answered. “But we do need some kind of way to get rid of more niggers faster. You put some bright boys on that and see what they can come up with.”
“Right.” Ferdinand Koenig heaved himself out of his chair and headed for the door. Jake had no idea what he would come up with or even if he would come up with anything, but had no doubt he would look, and look hard. If you looked hard enough, you generally found something.
Muttering, Jake went back to looking through his paperwork. He wished he thought he would find anything else important, or even something interesting, in there. “Fat chance,” he muttered. “Fat fucking chance.” He made sure he kept his voice down; Lulu didn’t like to hear him swear. That didn’t always stop him, but it did a good part of the time.
And then he turned up a report from an outfit called the Huntsville Rocket Society. He wondered how the hell anything that bizarre had made it onto his desk. Then he saw why. The brigadier general in charge of air defense of Alabama and Mississippi endorsed it, writing, However startling these claims sound, I believe they can be made real soon enough to prove useful in the present conflict.
That made Jake read it more carefully than he would have otherwise. “Son of a bitch,” he murmured halfway through. “Son of a bitch. Wouldn’t that be something if they could?”
VIII
AS THE weather heated up, the POW camp near Andersonville, Georgia, did an increasingly good impression of hell. With the heat came humidity. With the humidity came thunderstorms that awed Jonathan Moss. The red dirt in the camp turned to something not a great deal thicker than tomato soup after one of those downpours.
And the mosquitoes came. Moss had known mosquitoes up in Canada, too. These seemed a larger and more virulent breed. He slapped and swore and itched. He was anything but the only one. Nick Cantarella said, “This one I smashed last night, you could hang machine guns under its wings and go to war in it.”
“Who says they don’t?” Moss answered. “That would account for the size of some of the bites I’ve got.”
The other officer laughed. “You’re a funny guy, Major.”
“Funny like a crutch,” Moss said, and then, “Colonel Summers ought to do something about it. We could all come down with yellow fever.”
“Do what?” Cantarella asked in reasonable tones. “Moses parted the Red Sea, but all he did was plague the Egyptians with bugs. God was the one who had to call ’em off.”
Patiently, Moss answered, “Moses couldn’t ask for bug repellent and Flit. Come to think of it, Pharaoh couldn’t, either. But Summers damn well can.”
“Oh.” Cantarella looked foolish. “Well, yeah.”
Moss didn’t ask him how escape efforts were going. He assumed they were still going. He also assumed that much rain did tunnels no good. He looked out the window, out beyond the barbed wire. Even if the prisoners did get out of the camp, could they cross several states and get back to the USA? They spoke with an accent very different from the locals’. They would be pursued—he pictured bloodhounds straight out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And the people they met—the white ones, anyhow—would be Freedom Party fanatics. Put that all together and staying in the camp started to seem the better bargain.
But life h
ere was no picnic, either. And prisoners of war had a duty to escape. Moss knew he’d run if and when he found a chance. As for what would happen after that . . . He’d worry about such things when he had to, not before.
In due course, citronella candles appeared in the prisoners’ barracks. They filled the air with a spicy, lemony scent as they burned. The odor was alleged to discourage mosquitoes. Maybe Moss got bitten a little less often after that. On the other hand, maybe he didn’t. He wasn’t convinced, one way or the other.
Guards went through the camp with spray pumps. The mist that came out of them smelled something like mothballs and something like gasoline. Moss had no idea what it did to mosquitoes. It made him want to wear a gas mask. Since he didn’t have one, he just had to put up with it.
Again, he wasn’t sure how much difference the spraying made. The bugs didn’t disappear, however much he wished they would. Of course, nobody was spraying outside the camp. Even if mosquitoes died by the thousands inside the barbed wire, plenty of replacements flew on in to sample the flavor delights of prisoner of war on the hoof.
Colonel Summers, once prodded, kept right on complaining, both to the Confederate authorities and to his fellow prisoners. “What they really need to do is spray a thin film of oil over every pond and puddle they can find,” he said. “That would kill the mosquito larvae, and then we really might get some relief.”
“Well, why don’t they?” Moss said. “It wouldn’t just benefit us. Their own health would get better, too.” He thought like the attorney he was, weighing advantages and disadvantages.
Summers only shrugged. “They say they haven’t got the manpower for it.”
“In a way, that’s good news,” Moss said. “If they’re stretched too thin to take care of important things behind the lines, pretty soon they’ll be stretched too thin to take care of things at the front.” Like a lawyer—and like a prisoner—he bent reality so it looked better than it really was.
“That hasn’t happened yet.” Colonel Summers brought him back to earth with a dose of the current news.
“Are you sure, sir?” Moss asked. “Anything you see in the papers the guards give us is just so much Freedom Party garbage.”
“I’m sure.” And Summers sounded very sure indeed. Moss knew there were a couple of clandestine wireless sets in the camp. He knew no more than that, which was a good thing for all concerned. He looked around the barracks. Two or three of the men were new fish, new officers for whom nobody here could vouch. They probably came from the United States. They talked as if they did. But good Confederate spies would sound like Yankees. The less Summers said while they were around, the better.
Machine-gun fire woke Moss in the middle of the night not quite a week later. His first reaction was fury. They’d pulled off an escape attempt, and they hadn’t included him. His second reaction was despair. If the guards were shooting, the attempt couldn’t have amounted to much. Was this the best his countrymen could do?
He got very little sleep the rest of the night.
At roll call the next morning, the Confederate guards swaggered and strutted like pouter pigeons. “Damn niggers came sniffin’ round the camp last night,” one of them said. “We drove ’em off, though—you better believe it.”
However proud of themselves they were, their posturing only filled Moss with relief. Nothing inside here had gone wrong. If the guards wanted to jump up and down because they’d beaten back a few sorry guerrillas, they were welcome to, as far as he was concerned.
Later that day, he found an excuse to amble around the grounds with Nick Cantarella. As casually as he could, he asked, “Do we have any way of getting in touch with those colored men on the other side of the barbed wire?”
Cantarella took a couple of steps without saying anything. What he did say, at last, was, “I ought to tell you I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Why?” Moss asked. “They could do us a lot of good if we ever happened to get on the other side of the wire ourselves.”
“Maybe.” Cantarella paused to light a cigarette. It was one of the lousy U.S. brands that came in Red Cross packages from the north. Prisoners could sometimes get the much better Confederate tobacco from the guards. Quiet little deals like that happened every now and again. After the first drag, Cantarella made a face. “Tastes like straw and horseshit.” A moment later, he added, “Want one?”
“Sure.” Moss took one, then leaned close to get a light. The tobacco was bad, but bad tobacco beat the hell out of no tobacco. He blew out smoke and then asked, “How come just maybe?”
The other officer looked around before answering. Satisfied nobody else was in earshot, he said, “For one thing, if the Confederates catch us with them, we’re dead. No ifs, ands, or buts. Dead.”
That was probably true. Moss shook his head—no, that was bound to be true. The Confederate States played by the usual international rules when they fought the United States. They played by no rules at all when they fought their own Negroes. By all the signs, the Negroes returned the favor—if that was the word. Moss said, “But if we’ve got a better chance of not getting caught at all . . .”
“Maybe,” Nick Cantarella said again, even more dubiously than before. “But why should they help us get back to the USA?”
As if to a child, Moss answered, “Because we’re fighting Featherston, too.”
“Terrific,” the younger man said. “Doesn’t that make them more likely to give us rifles and enlist us? You want to be a guerrilla yourself? I don’t, or not very much. It’s not what I was trained for, but I wouldn’t have a Chinaman’s chance of convincing the smokes of that.” He’d been an artilleryman before he got caught.
“Some of the people here would be good at it,” Moss said. Infantry officers might make the black guerrillas considerably more effective. They really did have training in what the Negroes were trying to do. Moss himself was in Cantarella’s boat. All his military expertise, such as it was, centered on airplanes. He didn’t think the guerrillas would be taking to the air anytime soon.
A flight of a dozen biplanes buzzing along at not much above treetop height made him wonder if he was wrong. Those weren’t military aircraft, except in the sense that any aircraft could be military when you had them and the other fellows didn’t. As if to prove the point, and to show whose side they were on, they dropped bombs on the woods out beyond the prison camp. The explosions set Moss’ teeth on edge.
“Think they’ll hit anything in there?” he asked Cantarella.
“Oh, they’ll hit something,” the other officer answered with an expressive shrug. “Whether it’ll be anything worth hitting . . . That’s liable to be a different question.”
“Looking like they were just tossing those bombs out of the cockpit,” Moss said. “That’s how this whole business got started, back when the Great War was new.”
“If you say so.” Cantarella wasn’t old enough to remember the start of the Great War. He sure as hell hadn’t been flying then, as Moss had.
A few days later, Moss put the question he’d asked Cantarella to Colonel Summers. The senior officer looked at him as if he’d suddenly started spouting Cherokee. “Trust a bunch of raggedy-ass niggers? You must be kidding, Major.” But for his accent, he sounded like a Confederate himself.
With such patience as he could muster, Moss asked, “Do you know anybody who hates Jake Featherston more—or who has better reason to?”
Summers ignored that. “Besides, Major, we’ve got no way to get in touch with the spooks.” He sounded like a man anxious to close off a subject he found distasteful. He might have been a maiden lady forced into talking about the facts of life.
Moss didn’t laugh in his face, which proved military discipline still held. He did say, “Sir, we have all kinds of deals cooking that stretch farther than the camp. Spread a few dollars around and you can do damn near anything.”
“Not this.” Summers spoke as if from On High. “Not this, by God. No Confederate gu
ard is going to go out and get hold of the niggers for us. That’d be like asking them to cut their own throats.”
He had a point—of sorts. “There are bound to be ways if we look for them,” Moss persisted. “We haven’t even tried.”
“Once we’re outside the barbed wire, Major, you may put your faith in niggers or Christian Science or any other damnfool thing your heart desires,” Colonel Summers said. “Until then, I make the decisions, and I have made this one. Is that clear enough for you, or shall I be more explicit?”
“You are very clear . . . sir.” Moss turned the title of respect into one of reproach.
Summers heard the reproach and went red. “Will that be all, Major?” he asked in a voice like ice.
“I suppose so,” Moss answered bitterly. “After all, we’re not going anywhere, are we?”
****
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Jefferson Pinkard slammed down the telephone and scowled at it as if it were a rattlesnake. “Son of a bitch!” he added for good measure. He slammed a fist down on his desk. His coffee mug and the gooseneck lamp there jumped. He had to grab the lamp to keep it from toppling over.
He’d hated calls from Richmond ever since he started running camps. He had good reason for hating them, too. Richmond had a habit of wanting miracles, and of wanting them yesterday.
Jeff had already given them one—a more efficient, more secure way of disposing of excess Negroes than they’d ever had before. Now that wasn’t good enough for them anymore. He had to come up with something better yet. He hoped the other people who were running camps had got the same call. Let one of them have a brainstorm for a change!
“Fat chance,” he muttered. Some of those people could blow their brains out if they sneezed, goddammit.
He knew the question was ridiculous and unfair. That didn’t stop him from worrying at it like a dog worrying at a bone that was plumb out of meat. How could you get rid of more spooks faster than with this fleet of special trucks?
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