Rather than replying, Abell pulled a notebook from a breast pocket and scribbled in it. “You . . . may be right,” he said when he put the notebook back. “It’s a, ah, more indirect approach to defending the interior regions than we’d had in mind. What happens if you’re wrong?”
“I’ll probably be too dead to worry about it,” Morrell answered. Abell blinked—no, he didn’t think about things like leading from the front. Morrell went on, “But whoever takes over for me will have a couple of things going for him. Either the Confederates won’t have taken all the lakefront, or they’ll have fought their way through it. If they haven’t, he can hit them in the flank. If they have, with luck they’ll be bled white and they’ll have a tougher time getting to Pittsburgh—if that’s where they’re going.”
“That is the current assessment,” Abell said primly.
Bully. But, again, Morrell swallowed the old-fashioned slang before it came out. He and the desk warriors of Philadelphia might not agree on means, but they did on ends. If he were Jake Featherston and he wanted to try to knock the USA out of the war, he would have gone after Pittsburgh, too. Pontiac was the other possibility. Engine production, though, was more widely dispersed than steel. And without steel, you couldn’t make engines for very long, either.
“We’ll do what we can, Colonel,” he said.
“We have to do more than that,” John Abell exclaimed.
Morrell started to laugh, then checked himself yet again. Abell hadn’t been joking. Morrell looked at the map again. Abell had no reason to joke, either.
****
Dr. Leonard O’Doull had thought that pulling out of Fredericksburg would cut U.S. casualties. And so it would, no doubt, in the long run. In the short run . . . In the short run, the Confederates on the heights gleefully bombarded the withdrawing men in green-gray. They’d knocked out the pontoon bridges over the Rappahannock more than once, knocked them out and then poured shellfire into the men stuck near them waiting to cross.
“I hate artillery,” O’Doull remarked as he worked to repair a mangled leg. He’d thought at first that he would have to take it off. Now he hoped this corporal would be able to keep it, and thought he would, too, if he didn’t get a wound infection that spread to the bone.
Across the table from him, Granville McDougald nodded. “The wounds are a lot nastier than anything a bullet can do, aren’t they?”
“They’re more likely to be, anyhow.” O’Doull had seen horrors from both. A lot of the very worst horrors, he’d never seen at all. They were reserved for front-line soldiers and stretcher bearers and Graves Registration personnel. No one could hope to repair some wounds. God almighty would have had trouble repairing some men hit by artillery fire for the Resurrection.
“Get that bleeder there, Doc,” McDougald said, and O’Doull did. The bald medic went on, “I thought you were crazy when you said you were going to try and patch this leg. I’d’ve just reached for the bone saw myself. But you may get a good result out of it. My hat’s off to you.” He doffed an imaginary chapeau.
“I hope so—and thanks.” O’Doull yawned behind his surgical mask. Granville McDougald chuckled, recognizing the expression. O’Doull added, “Jesus, but I’m tired.”
“I believe it. This just never ends, does it?”
“Doesn’t seem to,” O’Doull said. “Now they’ll probably ship us back to Ohio, eh? That would give us a few days of vacation.”
“Oh, boy,” McDougald said in a hollow voice. “We’re getting plenty of practice going back and forth, anyway.”
They were still joking about it when the corpsman brought in another wounded man. They both fell silent at the same time. All O’Doull said was, “Get him under fast, Granny.” McDougald nodded and put the ether cone over the soldier’s face. Even that wasn’t easy; he’d lost part of his nose. He’d also lost a chunk of his upper jaw and a bigger chunk of his lower jaw. He made horrible gobbling noises nothing like words.
“Can you fix him, Doc?” one of the corpsmen asked. The fellow gulped afterwards, and O’Doull had a devil of a time blaming him. This was another artillery horror, and viler than most.
Before answering, O’Doull told MacDougald, “Get a blood-pressure cuff on him, and watch his airway, too—don’t want him drowning on us.”
“Right.” The medic handled his end of the business with quick but unhurried competence. “BP is 110 over 70,” he reported a few seconds later. “He’s got a strong pulse, the poor bastard.”
“He would,” O’Doull said morosely. He nodded to the stretcher bearer then. “I don’t think he’s going to up and die on us, but I’m not sure we’re doing him any favor keeping him alive.”
“Yeah.” The corpsman looked away. With the best will in the world, with the best plastic surgery in the world—which, odds were, the wounded soldier wouldn’t be lucky enough to get—people would be looking away from the man on the table for the rest of his life. Did he have a girlfriend? A wife? Would he still, once she saw him? Did he have a little boy? What would Junior make of Daddy with half a face?
“Gotta try,” McDougald said, and O’Doull nodded. Some men were tough enough to come through something like this not only sane but triumphant. Some had people around them who loved them no matter what they looked like.
Most, unfortunately, didn’t.
Knowing that made O’Doull more hesitant than he wished he were. He did what he could to clean the wound, trim away smashed tissue and bone, and make repairs where and as he could. Then he shot the man full of morphine and told McDougald, “Put him under as deep as he’ll go, Granny. He won’t want to be awake once he finally is. Let’s put off the evil minute as long as we can.”
“No arguments here. Back at a field hospital, they’ll get him all bandaged up so he won’t have to look at—that—right away. If they know what they’re doing, they’ll break it to him gently.”
“Yeah,” O’Doull said tightly, and let it go at that. Field hospitals were almost as frantic as aid stations. Would the people farther back of the line have the time to think of gently breaking the news of this man’s mutilation? Even if they did think of it, would they have the time to do it? Or would they treat him as one more body that took up a valuable cot till they could send him somewhere else? O’Doull didn’t know, but he knew how he’d bet.
Granville McDougald straightened and stretched. “I’m gonna have me a cigarette,” he announced, and headed out of the tent.
“Sounds good to me.” Leonard O’Doull didn’t want to look at or think about that operating table for a while. The Virginia countryside wasn’t much of an improvement, not battered and bludgeoned by war as it was, but mutilated meadows were easier to bear than mutilated men.
McDougald held out a pack of Confederate cigarettes. O’Doull gladly took one. The veteran noncom gave him a light. He drew in smoke. Here, he almost wished it were the harsh stuff that came from U.S. tobacco. Wanting to choke would have done more to distract him than this rich-tasting smoothness.
Off to the south, artillery rumbled. Nothing was coming down close by. He thanked the God he was having ever more trouble believing in. “Bad one,” he said.
“Now that you mention it—yes. Don’t see ones like that ever day, and a good thing, too.” McDougald exhaled a thin gray stream of smoke. “You fixed him up as well as anybody could have, Doc.”
“I know. And he’ll still look like something they wouldn’t put in a horror movie because it would really scare people.” O’Doull took a flask off his belt and swigged from it, then offered it to McDougald. He didn’t usually drink when he might be operating again in another couple of minutes. This time, he made an exception. You didn’t see ones like that every day.
“You can do things now you couldn’t begin to in the last war,” McDougald said after a swig of his own. “Thanks, Doc. That hits the spot. Where was I? Yeah—you really can. Get him to where he looks like—”
“A disaster and not a catastrophe,” O’Doull finished for h
im. “Come on, Granny. There’s not enough left to fix. I’ve seen a lot of wounds, but that poor fucker made me want to lose my lunch.”
He tried to imagine writing Nicole a letter about what he’d just done. That was cruelly funny. He wouldn’t—couldn’t—have written it even if the censors would have passed it. He always wrote her in French, but they would have found somebody who could read it. But you couldn’t subject anyone you loved to even the shadow of what you went through when you were in combat or where you could see what combat did to men. His letters to his wife and son were bright, cheerful lies. When somebody at the aid station said something funny, he would pass that along, especially if it stayed funny in French. Otherwise, he just said he was well and safe and not working too hard. Lie after lie after lie. He didn’t know anyone who tried to tell the truth, not about this kind of thing.
McDougald ground out the cigarette under his heel and lit another one. “Days like this, I wonder why I stayed in the Army,” he said.
“I wonder why I came back,” O’Doull agreed.
“Oh, no, Doc. Oh, no. You did more for that guy than I ever could have. You’re good. I’m not bad—I know I’m not bad—but you’re good.”
“Thanks, Granny. I’m not good enough, not for that. Nobody’s good enough for that.” O’Doull muttered something under his breath. Even he wasn’t sure if it was curse or prayer. He went on, “Is there any point to all this?”
“For us? Sure,” Granville McDougald answered. “If not for us, a lot of guys would be a lot worse off than they are. What we do is worth doing. For the whole thing? I’m not the one to ask about that, sir. If you want to cross the lines and talk to Jake Featherston . . .”
“If I ever ran into Jake Featherston, I’d smash his head in with a rock, and screw the Hippocratic oath,” O’Doull said. McDougald laughed, for all the world as if he’d been kidding. He hadn’t, not even a little bit. In plaintive tones, he added, “Featherston went through the last war, every goddamn bit of it. Wasn’t that enough for him?”
“When you lose, a war is never enough,” McDougald answered. That probably held an unfortunate amount of truth. “You happen to recall what Remembrance Day was like before the Great War?”
O’Doull grunted, because he did. The United States, twice beaten and humiliated by the Confederates and Britain and France, had had a lot to remember. The regimentation, the constant stinting to build up the Army and Navy, the tub-thumping speeches, the parades with the flag flown upside down as a symbol of distress . . . He sighed. “So we finally won. So what did it get us?” He waved. “This.”
“What would we have got if we lost?” McDougald asked. “Something better? Something worse? Christ, we might have grown our own Featherston.”
“Tabernac!” O’Doull said, startled into the Quebecois French he’d used for so long. “That’s a really scary thought, Granny.”
The medic only shrugged. “When things go good, everybody laughs at people like that and says they belong in the loony bin. But when times get hard, they come out of the woodwork and people start paying attention. You go, ‘Well, how could they make things any worse? Let’s see what they can do.’ ”
“Yeah. And then they go and do it,” O’Doull said. Featherston wasn’t the only one of that breed running around loose these days, either. Action Française and King Charles had mobilized France even sooner than the Freedom Party grabbed the reins in the CSA. And in England, Churchill and Mosley were yet another verse of the same sorry song.
“It’s a bastard,” McDougald said. “Except for bashing in Featherston’s brains, to hell with me if I know what to do about it. And it might even be too late for that to do any good. By now, this mess has a life of its own.”
“Some life.” The aid station was close enough to the front to share in the smell of the battlefield. O’Doull knew what death smelled like. He lived with that odor—not always heavy, but always there. When war was alive, that smell always got loose.
“Doc! Hey, Doc!” Stretcher bearers hauled another wounded man toward the tent with the big Red Crosses on the sides. Leonard O’Doull and Granville McDougald looked at each other. Maybe they could save this one. Maybe he wouldn’t be horribly mangled. Maybe . . . They’d find out in a minute. Shaking their heads, they ducked back into the tent.
****
Appointments, appointments, appointments. Jake Featherston had started to hate them. They chewed up his time and spat it out. When he was talking with people, he couldn’t do the things that really needed doing. He even resented Ferdinand Koenig, and if Ferd wasn’t a friend he didn’t have any.
Today, a smile lightened the Attorney General’s heavy features. “That Pinkard fellow’s given us a new line on things,” he said. “We may be able to dispose of more niggers faster than we ever dreamed we could.”
“Oh, yeah?” Sure as hell, that piqued Jake’s interest. “Tell me about it.” Koenig did. The more Jake listened, the more intrigued he got. “Will this shit work?” he asked. “Do we make it in bulk now, or would we have to run up a new factory to get as much as we need?”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Koenig answered. “They already use the stuff to fumigate houses and such. There’s a company in Little Rock—Cyclone Chemicals, the name of the place is—that makes it by the ton. They aren’t the only one, either. They’re just the biggest.”
“Well, I will be a son of a bitch. Pinkard’s chock full of good ideas, isn’t he?” Jake said. “Promote him a grade and tell him to see what he can do to try this out as fast as he can. We’ve got a big job ahead of us, and we’re going to need all the help we can get.”
“I’ll do it.” The Attorney General wrote in a notebook he pulled from a breast pocket. Half apologetically, he said, “I’ve got so much going on, I lose things if I don’t write ’em down. Forget my own head if it wasn’t nailed on tight.”
Jake laughed. “I know what you mean. Boy, don’t I just? But stay on that one, Ferd. Taking care of the niggers is just as important as licking the Yankees. Anything else I ought to know about?”
“Reports I get from here and there, grumbling about the war is up a little.”
“We’ll deal with it.” Jake muttered to himself. Things were dragging on longer than he’d told the country they would. That made propaganda harder than it should have been. “New offensive’s going well,” he said, looking on the bright side. “I’ll talk with Saul, too, see if we can’t figure out a way to perk up morale. Anything besides that?”
“Don’t think so.” Big and ponderous, Koenig rose to his feet. “I’ll get on the telephone to Pinkard right away.”
“Yeah, you do that.” Featherston got up, too, and walked to the door with him. As Koenig left, Jake asked, “Who’s next on the list, Lulu?”
“A Professor FitzBelmont, Mr. President,” his secretary answered. Working underground fazed her not at all. Jake suspected working underwater wouldn’t have fazed her, either.
“FitzBelmont . . .” The name was vaguely familiar. And then, with a good politician’s near-total recall for people, Jake remembered exactly who Professor Henderson V. FitzBelmont was. He groaned. “Oh, for God’s sake! The uranium nut. How did he get another appointment?”
“Do you want me to tell him it’s been canceled, sir?” Lulu asked.
“No, no,” Jake said resignedly. “If he’s out there cooling his heels in the waiting room, he’ll raise a stink if you send him home now. Fetch him in. I’ll get rid of him as quick as I can.”
Professor FitzBelmont was as rumpled and tweedy as he had been the year before. “Good to see you, Mr. President,” he said.
“Likewise,” Jake lied. “What’s on your mind today, Professor? Kindly cut to the chase—I’ve got a lot to do.”
“You will remember, sir, that I told you that uranium—uranium-235, that is—has the potential to make an explosive thousands of times as strong as dynamite.”
“I do recollect, yeah. But I also recollect it’d cost an arm and a l
eg, and you weren’t sure how long it’d take or whether you could do it at all. Has anything changed since then? Better be something, Professor, or I won’t be real happy with you. I haven’t got time to waste.”
Henderson V. FitzBelmont licked his lips and nervously fiddled with his gold-framed spectacles. “In terms of what we know about uranium itself, not much has changed.” Jake started to growl angrily, but FitzBelmont plowed ahead anyway: “But I do know, or I can make a good guess, that the United States are probably looking at this same question.”
“How do you know that?” Featherston rapped out. Professor FitzBelmont had found a way to make him pay attention, all right.
“For one thing, their journals have suddenly stopped mentioning uranium at all. For another, there are large engineering works in the northwestern USA that appear consistent with an effort along these lines.”
“And how do you know that?”
“I was asked by C.S. Intelligence to identify buildings in photos,” the professor replied. “No doubt because of my previous visit to you, those officers knew of my interest in that field. And if I were to build a plant for producing enriched uranium, it would look something like what the United States are building in Washington.”
“All right.” Featherston surprised himself by how mildly he spoke. Every once in a while, somebody who looked and sounded like a nut turned out not to be one after all. This felt like one of those times. “If the damnyankees are interested in this uranium stuff, too, there must be something to it. That’s what you’re telling me, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know, sir, not for sure. I don’t know whether we can isolate U-235, how long doing it would take, or how much it would cost. There also seems to be a possibility that U-238 can be transmuted—”
“Can be what?” Jake wished the prof would stop talking like a prof.
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