A few minutes later, the Confederates laid on an artillery barrage. Griffiths kept the hatch up on the cupola as long as he could. When gas rounds started gurgling in, though, he clanged it shut. “Button up!” he yelled over the intercom to the driver and bow gunner. Then he put on his gas mask. Resignedly, Pound did the same. With autumn here, wearing it wasn’t so awful as it had been during the summer. Even so, it cut down his vision, and it was awkward to use with a gunsight. Lieutenant Griffiths had an even harder time seeing out the cupola periscopes through his mask’s portholes.
Shrapnel clanged off the barrel’s chassis. A barrage like this wasn’t dangerous to armor except in case of an unlucky direct hit. Pound traversed the turret so the big gun—the pretty big gun, anyway—bore on the approach route he would use if he were a Confederate barrel commander. Griffiths set a hand on his shoulder to say he understood and approved.
Not much later, the barrel commander sang out: “Front!”
“Identified,” Pound answered—he saw the ugly beast, too. “Range 350.”
“You lined up on him so nicely, Sergeant,” Griffiths said. “Go ahead and do the honors.”
“Yes, sir,” Pound said, and then, to Bergman, “Armor-piercing.”
“Armor-piercing,” the loader echoed, and slammed a round in the breech.
Pound adjusted the main armament’s elevation just a little. The C.S. barrel came on, sure nothing nasty was in the neighborhood. Pound wouldn’t have been that confident. The enemy machine was one of the new models. Maybe that made the commander feel invulnerable. Infantrymen in butternut loped alongside, automatic rifles at the ready.
The U.S. barrel’s gun spoke. Pound’s mask kept out the cordite fumes. The shell casing clanged on the fighting compartment floor. “Hit!” Lieutenant Griffiths yelled. “That’s a hit!”
Smoke and fire spurted from the stricken C.S. barrel. The U.S. bow gunner opened up on the Confederate foot soldiers. One of them spun, his rifle flying out of his hands. He crumpled, right out there in the open. Other Confederate soldiers went down, too. They were more likely diving for cover than hit. Nobody came out of the barrel. Flames and a cloud of smoke burst from the cupola hatch. Five men dead, Pound thought, and then, Well, they wanted to kill me. I like it better this way.
He tapped Lieutenant Griffiths. “Sir, shouldn’t we move out of here and find another firing position? Next enemy barrel that comes this way is going to know where we’re at. Most ambushes only work once.”
“Good point,” the barrel commander said, and then, over the intercom to the driver, “Back us out, Mancatelli. Shift us over behind that pile of bricks to the left.”
He hadn’t been ready to move quite soon enough, but he’d had a backup firing position in mind when he did. It was a pretty good one, too; Michael Pound would have suggested it if Griffiths hadn’t seen it himself. But he had. No, he wasn’t such a helpless puppy after all.
After the barrel backed out of the garage, Mancatelli stayed in reverse long enough to move forward toward the secondary position. That kept the front glacis plate and the front of the turret facing the direction from which the barrel was likeliest to take fire. It avoided exposing the machine’s thinner side armor. Those who served in barrels knew their weaknesses best—except, maybe, for those who tried to destroy them.
Peering out through the gunsight, Pound saw soldiers in butternut pointing to where the barrel had been. That probably meant they were warning it was still there. Nobody pointed toward the wreckage behind which it now hunkered down. If a machine weighing upwards of twenty tons could be sneaky, this one had just done the trick.
And here came a pair of Confederate barrels. “Front!” Griffiths sang out. “The one on the right, Sergeant.”
“Identified,” Pound acknowledged. “Bergman, we’re going to have to do this fast as hell, because that other bastard will start shooting at us as soon as we nail his pal.” He assumed he would nail the first barrel; he had all the arrogance a good gunner should. As he traversed the turret, he added, “So give me two rounds of armor-piercing, fast as you can, when I say, ‘Now.’ . . . Now!”
The first round clanged home. Pound fired. He got his hit, on the enemy barrel’s turret. The second round was in the breech well before he’d brought the gun to bear on the second Confederate barrel—and the new turret had a hydraulic traverse, too, a feature he adored. His gun and the enemy’s belched fire at the same instant. The C.S. barrel burst into flames. The Confederate’s round slammed into the rubble, slammed through the rubble, but slowed enough so that it clanged off the U.S. barrel’s glacis plate instead of penetrating.
“Two hits! Two!” Griffiths yelled. He pounded Pound on the back. Cecil Bergman thumped him on the leg, which was the only part of him the loader could reach. They both told him what a wonderful fellow he was.
“Thank you, sir,” he said to Griffiths. Then he added, “I’d like to go on being wonderful a while longer, too, so could we please find another firing position?”
Griffiths laughed, but the barrel moved. That was all that really mattered.
****
Night came earlier now. As autumn deepened, U.S. bombers could spend more time above Richmond and other Confederate cities. Jake Featherston hated that as much as he loved C.S. bombers’ being able to spend more time over cities in the United States.
Except for that, night and day meant little to him in the shelter under what was left of the Gray House. He slept in odd chunks, a couple of hours here, three there, and stayed awake in equally odd chunks between the stretches of sleep.
Everyone around him had to adapt to that. If Jake was awake at four in the morning and needed to talk to Nathan Bedford Forrest III, Forrest could damn well get his ass over to the Gray House at four in the morning. The same went for Ferd Koenig and Clarence Potter and Saul Goldman and Lulu and the rest of his inner circle. He seemed to thrive on his erratic sleep schedule. No one else did.
Lulu stuck her head into his underground office. She was paler than she should have been. She didn’t get up into the sun and fresh air as often as she should these days. Jake suspected he was paler than he should have been, too. He didn’t like being stuck down here, but he didn’t like getting blown up, either.
“General Forrest is here to see you, Mr. President,” she said.
“Well, send him on in,” Jake replied. “Did he tell you what it was all about?” Forrest had asked for this meeting; Jake hadn’t summoned him. The chief of the General Staff had been coy about saying just what was on his mind, too.
But Featherston’s secretary shook her head. “No, sir.”
“All right. Never mind. I’ll find out,” Jake said.
Nathan Bedford Forrest III strode into the office and saluted. “Mr. President,” he said, and then, “Freedom!” and then, “May I shut the door?”
“Go ahead,” Featherston answered. Forrest had a pistol in his holster. He was one of the handful of men allowed to bear arms in Jake’s presence. Jake didn’t think Forrest had come here to plug him. If Forrest had, he wouldn’t waste time with the door. He’d just go ahead and do it. Jake waved him to a chair and asked, “What’s up?”
“Mr. President, it seems to me we’ve done a pretty good job of making Pittsburgh useless to the damnyankees,” Forrest said. “We’ve smashed it up so the steel production there’s gone straight to hell. Most of what the mills do make, the USA can’t get out of the city. Do we really need to hold the ground?”
“Damn straight we do,” Jake said without even a heartbeat’s hesitation. “We need to show those bastards we can beat ’em anywhere we please. And besides, the second we ease up, that town’ll come back to life like a monster in a horror flick. You know it as well as I do, too.”
Forrest looked unhappy. “Sir, what I know is, the damnyankees are chewing up men and barrels and airplanes we can’t afford to lose. They’ve got more people than we do, dammit, and that’s what they’re using. Between us, we and the Yankees’ve knocked
Pittsburgh cockeyed. They squat in the ruins and potshoot us.”
“We’ll lick ’em,” Jake declared. “That’s why every infantryman’s got an automatic weapon. Put enough lead in the air and the other guys fall over dead.”
“Sir, it’s not that simple,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said. “Fighting like that, there are no good targets. They make us come to them, and then they make us pay for coming. We’ve got crack regiments knocked down to the size of a couple of companies. Units just aren’t the same when you have to rebuild ’em after losses like that. It’s the same way with barrels. They pick a spot, they wait, and then they shoot first. Their new models aren’t as good as ours, but getting the first shot off counts for a hell of a lot, especially at short range. We’re losing barrels as fast as we can build ’em. And we’re losing veteran crews, too. That just isn’t good terrain for armor to attack in.”
“Whatever we’re losing, they’re losing worse,” Jake said.
Forrest nodded, which didn’t mean he agreed. “Yes, sir. They are,” he said. “But they can afford it better. This is how we got in trouble in the last war.”
He hadn’t been old enough to fight in the last war. Jake had been in it from first day to last. That a pup should have the nerve to tell him what had happened and what hadn’t . . . “We are going to take Pittsburgh,” Featherston said in a voice like iron. “We are. We’ll take it, and we’ll hold it, and if the damnyankees want it back they’ll have to kiss our ass. That’s the way it’s gonna be, General. Have you got it?”
“Yes, sir.” Nathan Bedford Forrest III got to his feet. He stood at stiff attention. He saluted with machinelike precision. He did a smart about-turn and marched out of the President’s office. He didn’t slam the door. He closed it silently, which was even more sarcastic.
“I haven’t convinced that man,” Jake muttered. But Forrest would follow orders when he got them. That was what soldiers were for. And Pittsburgh would fall. And when it did, the United States would have to make peace. They couldn’t very well fight a war if they didn’t have anything to fight with, could they?
Sometimes the fellows in the fancy uniforms started flabbling over nothing. Forrest hadn’t been one to do that, but he was doing it now. Jake had no doubts. He hardly ever had doubts. That was why he’d got where he was, why the Freedom Party had got where it was. People with doubts stopped before they ought to. If you just kept going, you’d get there. And he was going to get Pittsburgh.
Lulu came in. “Mr. President, Mr. Goldman is here to see you. He says it’s urgent.”
“Well, then, I’d better find out what he wants, eh?” Jake wondered what had gone wrong. Something must have, or Saul wouldn’t come to his office uninvited.
The director of communications gave him the news in three bald words: “Another people bombing.”
“Son of a bitch!” Jake said. “Where? How bad?”
“Jackson, Mississippi, sir,” Goldman answered. “A waiter at a restaurant there last night. It was crowded—some kind of ladies’ club function. Eleven known dead, at least forty hurt.”
“Plus the nigger, of course,” Featherston said.
“Yes, sir. Plus him. Two other waiters were also injured.” Goldman paused. “How do you want to treat this, Mr. President? I hate to say it, but keeping quiet about what the Mormons are doing in the USA hasn’t worked.”
Jake knew why he hated to say it: saying it meant saying Jake Featherston was wrong. But Goldman had said it, and Jake couldn’t very well claim not talking about people bombs had kept them from scarring the CSA. He made a discontented noise down deep in his throat. He wanted to say exactly that. But he had to deal with the truth, no matter how little he liked it.
He thought for a few seconds, then nodded to himself. “All right. Here’s how we’ll play it. You can splash this one all over the papers, Saul. A ladies’ club, you say? Make it an atrocity story to end all atrocity stories, then. Nigger murders Confederate white women! That’ll make people’s blood boil. And you can let folks know all the coons’ll pay for what that one bastard went and did.”
Goldman didn’t always show everything he thought. By the way he brightened now, that was what he’d wanted to hear, and he’d wanted very much to hear it. “Yes, sir, Mr. President!” he said, enthusiasm bubbling in his voice. “That sounds like just the right line to take. I’ll handle everything. Don’t you worry about it.”
“I don’t,” Jake said simply. “If I worried about the way you did your job, Saul, somebody else would be doing it, and you can take that to the bank.”
“Uh, yes, sir,” Goldman said. Jake didn’t want him scared, so he made himself smile. That did the trick. Goldman got to his feet and said, “I’ll get right on it. If you’ll excuse me . . . ?”
“Go on, go on,” Featherston said indulgently. The director of communications hurried away. Jake got on the telephone. “Ferd? . . . You heard about the shit that happened in Jackson? . . . Yeah, Saul told me just now. Eleven dead plus the nigger! Jesus Christ! . . . How fast can you get the Party mobilized to help the cops and soldiers? . . . That quick? Good! . . . By this time Thursday, then, I don’t want one nigger left in Jackson—not one, you hear me? And when they get where they’re going, I don’t want ’em hanging around, either . . . You see to it, that’s all. ’Bye.” He hung up—he slammed down the telephone, as a matter of fact.
He wasted a few seconds swearing at the Mormons. Those damned fanatics had come up with a weapon other fanatics could use. Mississippi and Alabama had been in revolt since he took office, and they hadn’t been what anybody would call calm even before that. Too damn many coons, that was all there was to it. Well, he aimed to thin ’em out. And what he aimed at, he got.
He wondered whom Lulu would announce when she came in again. Instead of announcing anybody, she asked, “When was the last time you ate something, Mr. President?”
“Why—” Before Jake could finish talking, his stomach let out a rumble you could hear across the room. “Been a while, I guess,” he said sheepishly.
“I’ll get the kitchens to send you something.” She wagged a finger at him. “You’ve got to take care of yourself, you know.”
“Right,” Jake said. “I have been busy, you know.” He was amazed at how defensive he sounded. He could ream out the chief of the General Staff and stop him in his tracks. His own secretary? That was a whole different story. What made the difference? Lulu was right, and Nathan Bedford Forrest III damn well wasn’t. So he told himself, anyhow.
Not ten minutes later, Lulu came back with a tray with two thick roast-beef sandwiches, potato salad, and a bottle of beer. Jake got outside the food in nothing flat. He did feel better afterwards. He wasn’t about to admit it to her. On the other hand, he didn’t have to—she would already know.
His restless energy burned off what he ate and left him with the same lanky frame he’d had half a lifetime before. He knew he wasn’t as strong as he had been then, though. He wasn’t fat, but his muscles had gone soft and slack. He didn’t get the exercise he once had. Manhandling a field gun was a lot tougher physically than being President of the CSA and running things from behind a desk.
“I ought to put in time every day at . . . something hard, anyway,” he muttered to himself. “Something, dammit.” When you got past fifty, you had to take care of yourself the way you took care of a motorcar. You’d break down if you didn’t, and replacement parts for your carcass were mighty hard to come by.
But he had no idea what to do to keep fit. He couldn’t imagine himself playing golf or riding a bicycle or anything like that. Plain old calisthenics, like the ones from his Army days, were too boring to stand without a drill sergeant making you do them. And where would he find the time, anyway? He didn’t have time to do everything he needed to do now.
He muttered again, this time blasphemously. He knew what would happen. He wouldn’t find the time, and then six months or a year from now he’d be even angrier and more disgusted with himself, be
cause he’d be that much further out of shape. He didn’t have any good answers, though. The only way he could find the time to exercise was to stop being President. He wasn’t about to do that.
Some of his pilots took pep pills to stay awake when they needed to fly mission after mission after mission. He’d always stayed away from those. Coffee and his own drive kept him going. But if coffee and his own drive flagged . . .
He shrugged. It was something to think about, anyway. He didn’t have to make up his mind once and for all right this minute. If he ever decided he needed those pills, he could get ’em.
****
Richmond. Capitol Square. A cool, gray, fall day, with the smell of burning leaves in the air—along with other, less pleasant, smells of burning and death. Clarence Potter sat on a bench in the bomb-cratered square and looked at the enormous pyramids of sandbags surrounding the great statues of George Washington and Albert Sidney Johnston. The Egyptians wouldn’t have been ashamed of pyramids like those. So far, they’d done their job. Despite all the damnyankee bombing raids, both statues remained more or less intact.
The Confederate Capitol couldn’t be sandbagged. It looked more like a ruin from the days of Greece and Rome than a place where important things happened. And important things didn’t happen there anymore. Congress met somewhere else these days—exactly where was classified. Potter wasn’t sure why. What difference did it make? Even if the USA blew Congress clean off the map, what difference would it make? Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party ran the CSA these days; Congress was a rubber stamp and a sounding board, and that was about it.
Potter lit a cigarette, adding more smoke to the air that had already made him cough twice. He looked at his watch. The man he was supposed to meet here was late, and he shouldn’t have been. Had something gone wrong?
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