Before long, Chester and his comrades needed to fall back again. Again, though, they fell back into prepared positions. In spite of retreating, he felt more confident. The Confederates could overrun any one position, but each one cost them. How many could they overrun before they started running out of men to do it?
****
Not far from Ellaville, Georgia, ran a stretch of highway locally called the Memorial Mile. Marble stelae stood by the side of the road. Brass plaques mounted on the marble commemorated Sumter County soldiers who’d served in the Great War. WIA by a name meant the soldier had been wounded in action; KIA by a name meant he’d been killed.
The Negro guerrillas who’d attached Jonathan Moss and Nick Cantarella to their number hated the Memorial Mile with a fierce and terrible passion. “How many names you reckon they be if they put up all the niggers from here they done killed?” asked their chief, who went by the name of Spartacus. Moss suspected that was a nom de guerre; it was, as far as he was concerned, a damn good one.
“If you’re gonna keep on playing this game, you’ll put some more crackers’ names on some kinda stones,” Nick Cantarella said. His clotted New York vowels and Spartacus’ lazy-sounding drawl hardly seemed to belong to the same language. Sometimes they had to pause so each could figure out what the other was saying. But they had something in common: they both wanted to cause the Confederates as much grief as they could.
A convoy of trucks rumbled along the road from Ellaville towards Americus. Command cars with machine guns shepherded the trucks along. Opening up on them would have invited massive retaliation. “One advantage you’ve got with these pine woods,” Moss said.
“What’s that?” Spartacus asked.
“They don’t lose their leaves this time of year,” Moss replied. “Easier to hide here than it would be in a forest full of bare-branched trees.”
“Not gonna be much snow on the ground, neither,” Cantarella said. “It’s really a bitch, tryin’ to cover your tracks in the snow.”
Spartacus pursed his lips, then slowly nodded. He was about forty-five, just going gray at the temples, with a scar that looked like a bullet crease on his right forearm. If he hadn’t been black, he would have put Moss in mind of a career noncom—he had that air of rough, no-nonsense competence about him. Suddenly, Moss asked, “Did you fight for the CSA the last time around?”
“Sure enough did,” Spartacus answered. “Got shot fo’ mah country—reckoned it was mah country in them days. Case you wonderin’, ain’t no niggers’ names on them goddamn memorials, neither. I even vote once—they let me do it in ’21, on account of they was afeared that Featherston fucker was gonna win then. But he los’, an’ I never seen the inside o’ no votin’ booth since. Ain’t seen nothin’ but trouble since the Freedom Party come in.”
A boxy, old-fashioned Birmingham with a white-haired white man at the wheel drove by. “You could nail somebody like him easy enough, make the Confederates try and go after you here, then hit somewhere else,” Cantarella said.
“Don’t want to shoot that there ofay,” Spartacus said. “That there’s Doc Thomason, an’ he been settin’ bones an’ deliverin’ babies for buckra and niggers for damn near fifty years. If you can only pay him a chicken, he take your chicken. If you can’t pay him nothin’, he set your arm anyways. Ain’t all white folks bad—jus’ too many of ’em.”
“All right. Fine. We don’t shoot the doc. He ain’t gonna be the only guy on the road, though,” Cantarella said. “Shoot somebody else. Maybe even hang around to shoot at the first fuckers who come to see what you went and did. Then when they’re all flabbling about that, kick ’em in the nuts some other place. Make them react to you.”
“We done some o’ that,” Spartacus said. “We done a couple of people bombs, too, over by Americus. Them Freedom Party assholes, they don’t like people bombs none.” He spoke with a certain grim satisfaction.
Moss looked at Cantarella. The Army captain was looking back at him. Moss didn’t need to be able to read minds to know what Cantarella was thinking. They didn’t like people bombs, either. But as weapons the weak could use against the strong, they were hard to match.
“How do you get people to volunteer to blow themselves up?” Moss asked carefully, not sure if the question would offend Spartacus.
But the guerrilla leader looked at him—looked through him, really—and answered, “Don’t gotta drug ’em none or get ’em drunk. Don’t gotta say we’s gonna kill their wives an’ chillun, neither. Dat’s what you mean, ain’t it?” Moss gave back an unhappy nod. Spartacus went on, “See—you is a white man, even if you comes from the US of A. You is happy most o’ the time, an’ you reckons everybody else happy most o’ the time. Ain’t like dat if you is a nigger in these here Confederate States. Somebody blow hisself up here, he a lucky man. Do Jesus!—he mighty lucky. He go out quick—it don’t hurt none. He make the ofays pay. And he don’t go to no goddamn camp where they let him in but he don’t come out no mo’. I got mo’ people wants to be people bombs’n I got ’splosives an’ chances to use ’em.”
“Shit,” Nick Cantarella said softly. His comment was at least as reverent as Spartacus’. He added, “That explains the Mormons up in the USA, too—to hell with me if it doesn’t.”
“We is powerful jealous o’ them Mormons,” Spartacus said.
“Because they thought of people bombs and you didn’t?” Moss asked.
“No, no.” Spartacus waved that aside. “On account o’ they is white, jus’ like the rest o’ you damnyankees. Can’t tell who a Mormon is jus’ by lookin’. He go where he please before he press the button. Nobody worry about him none till too late.”
Moss and Cantarella looked at each other again. The Negro wasn’t wrong. And he understood the difference between deaths and effective deaths. A lot of Great War generals hadn’t—their method for smothering fires was burying them in bodies. Some officers in this war had the same disease; Daniel MacArthur’s name sprang to mind. Had Spartacus worn stars on his shoulder straps instead of a collarless shirt with rolled-up sleeves and dungarees out at the knees, he might have made a formidable officer, not just a sergeant.
But the United States didn’t let Negroes enlist in the Army as privates, let alone send them to West Point to learn the art of command and the fine points of soldiering. In a troubled voice, Moss said, “You make me wonder about my own country, Spartacus, not just yours.”
“Good,” the black man rumbled. “Wonderin’s good. Ain’t nothin’ gonna change till you wonder if it oughta.”
A band of his raiders slipped south from Ellaville toward Plains, a small town west of Americus. Moss and Cantarella went along with them, bolt-action Tredegars in their hands. They were moving south and west from Andersonville: deeper into the Confederacy. In a way, that was good—the camp guards and county sheriffs and whoever else went after escaped POWs were less likely to look for them there. But they had to move cautiously. Negroes walking through peanut fields could be sharecroppers looking for work, but whites doing the same thing were bound to rouse suspicion.
Burnt cork, the staple of minstrel shows for generations, solved the problem. Up close, Cantarella and especially the fairer Moss made unsatisfactory Negroes, but they passed muster at a distance.
“What do we do when we get there?” Moss asked Spartacus.
“Much as we kin,” Spartacus replied. “Burn, kill, and then git.” That seemed to cover everything that needed covering, as far as he was concerned.
Real sharecroppers and farm laborers put the guerrillas up for the night. The way the other blacks accepted them said everything that needed saying, as far as Moss was concerned. Not all the Negroes in the CSA would fight against the Freedom Party. That took more spirit than some people owned. He couldn’t imagine a black betraying those who would fight to the authorities, though.
Negroes raised eyebrows at him and Cantarella, but relaxed when they heard the white men were escaped U.S. POWs. “Damnyankees is all ri
ght,” said an old man with only a few teeth. He didn’t seem to know any other name for people from the United States. Sowbelly, fatback, hominy, sweet potatoes, harsh moonshine—the locals fed them what they had.
“Gots to make the ofay pay.” Moss heard that again and again.
The band that approached Plains numbered about fifty—a platoon’s worth of men. Moss worried as he trudged through the night toward the little town. If the Confederates had a real garrison there, they could slaughter the raiders. “Don’t flabble about it,” Nick Cantarella said when he worried out loud. “First thing is, the smokes around here would know if they were layin’ for us. Second thing is, they don’t have enough guys to garrison every little pissant burg, not if they want to fight a war with us, too.”
Logic said he was right. Sometimes logic let you down with a thud, but. . . . “Sounds good,” Moss said.
Sentries did patrol the peanut fields around Plains. With almost contemptuous ease, the Negroes disposed of the one who might have discovered them. The gray-haired man died almost before he knew someone was drawing a knife across his throat. Only a small, startled sigh escaped him. A guerrilla threw aside his own squirrel gun and appropriated the sentry’s Tredegar. “Too good a piece to waste on a damn fool,” he said.
“Let’s go,” Spartacus said.
They trotted silently into Plains. The silence didn’t last long. They started firing into some houses and tossing Featherston Fizzes into others. Fires roared to life. Alarm bells started ringing. Volunteer firemen emerged from their houses to fight the flames. The raiders picked them off one after another.
“Niggers!” somebody shouted. “Holy Jesus, there’s niggers loose in Plains!”
“Phone wires cut?” Cantarella demanded of Spartacus.
“We done took care of it,” the guerrilla leader said with a savage grin. “Don’t want no help comin’ from nowhere else.”
Here and there, townsfolk fired from windows with rifles or shotguns. Those houses got volleys of fire from the Negroes, as well as gasoline bombs to kill the resisters or drive them out in the open where they made easier prey. Moss also heard women’s screams that sounded more outraged than terrified. “You won’t find any fighting force in the world where that shit doesn’t happen,” Cantarella said. Moss nodded, which didn’t mean he liked it any better.
Somebody in Plains organized defenders who fought as a group, not as so many individuals. “Over here, Jimmy!” a woman called. “We got trouble over here!”
“Be there real quick, Miss Lillian!” a man answered. Moss got a glimpse of him in the firelight: a kid with a mouthful of teeth, wearing a dark gray C.S. Navy tunic over pajama bottoms. Home on leave? Whatever the reason he was here, he was tough and smart and brave, and he’d make real trouble if he got even half a chance.
He didn’t. Moss made sure of that. The Tredegar’s stock didn’t fit his shoulder quite the same way as the U.S. Army Springfield he’d trained with, but the difference didn’t matter. He pulled the trigger gently—he didn’t squeeze it. The rifle bucked. Jimmy, the Navy man here in the middle of Georgia, spun and crumpled.
“Good shot!” Spartacus yelled.
Without a commander who sounded as if he knew what he was doing, the defenders went back to fighting every man for himself. Spartacus’ raiders weren’t well disciplined, but they had a better notion of what they were doing than their foes. They killed as many whites as they could, started fires all over town, and faded back into the countryside. “Well,” Moss said, “we yanked their tails pretty good.”
“Sure did,” Nick Cantarella agreed. “Now we see how hard they yank back.”
****
Clarence Potter had been going at a dead run ever since he put on the Confederate uniform again. He’d been going even harder than that since the war started. And he was going harder still these past few weeks, since things started turning against the CSA.
To make matters worse, he and Nathan Bedford Forrest III flinched whenever they saw each other even if they were just getting bad fried chicken in the War Department cafeteria. He wished Forrest had kept his mouth shut. Now the chief of the General Staff had him thinking—always a dangerous thing to do.
What if Jake Featherston wasn’t crazy like a fox? What if he was just plain crazy, period? Around the bend? Nutty as a fruitcake? Two cylinders short of a motor?
“Well, what then?” Potter muttered. He wouldn’t have been surprised if there were microphones in his subterranean office. The President of the CSA wouldn’t need to be crazy to mistrust him, not after everything that had happened between them over the past twenty-five years. Featherston wouldn’t need to be crazy to mistrust his spymasters, either, no matter who they were. But that handful of words seemed safe enough; Potter could have been wondering about any number of things.
He laughed, as people will laugh when the other choice is crying their eyes out. The rescue drive toward Pittsburgh was moving forward. The map on his wall showed that. But it wasn’t moving forward fast enough. And the cargo airplanes that were supposed to supply the Confederates trapped in the Pittsburgh pocket were taking an ungodly beating. Potter didn’t know what the officers who’d promised transports could do the job had been smoking. Whatever it was, he wished he had some now. Reality needed some blurring.
And Featherston still wouldn’t let the men in the pocket fight their way west to meet their would-be rescuers, either. “What we have, we hold!” he said, over and over again. Clarence Potter didn’t know what he’d been smoking, either.
Just to make matters more delightful, Lubbock was liable to fall. Some of the nuisance drives the USA had launched to keep the Confederates from strengthening themselves for the rescue effort in Ohio and Pennsylvania were turning into bigger nuisances than even the generals who’d launched them probably expected.
The Attorney General’s office, of all things, was having conniptions about this one. Somewhere southeast of Lubbock was something called Camp Determination. Clarence Potter didn’t know what that was, not in any official way. He didn’t want to know, not in any official way. He had a pretty good unofficial idea.
He also saw the need for places like that. Negro raiders were getting more and more annoying. That Navy man in that little Georgia town, shot down in front of his mother . . . Half the town was wrecked, too, and it wasn’t the only one guerrillas had hit. Two people bombs in Augusta, one in Savannah, another in Charleston . . .
Potter whistled tunelessly between his teeth. The really alarming part was, things could have been worse. The USA did only a halfhearted job of supplying black guerrillas. Whites up there didn’t love them, either. If the damnyankees had gone all-out, they could have caused even more trouble than they did.
One bit of good news—Mexican troops would take some of the spook-fighting off the CSA’s hands. Potter didn’t know what Jake Featherston said to Maximilian. Whatever it was, it got the Emperor of Mexico moving. It probably scared the living bejesus out of him, too. Jake Featherston was not a subtle man.
Someone knocked on Potter’s door. He paused to put a couple of papers into drawers before he said, “Come in.”
“Here you are, sir.” A lieutenant handed him a manila envelope.
“Thanks,” Potter said. “Do I need to sign for it?”
“No, sir,” the junior officer answered, which surprised him.
“All right, then.” The lieutenant saluted and disappeared. When Potter opened the envelope, he understood. It was a progress report from Henderson V. FitzBelmont. That project was so secret, it didn’t have a paper trail. This way, no Yankee spy filing sign-off sheets would wonder about it. Better safe.
He quickly read through the report. It was, for the most part, an account of technical difficulties. Uranium hexafluoride was poisonous and savagely corrosive. FitzBelmont and his people were still working out techniques for handling it. Till they did, separating U-235 from U-238 couldn’t even start.
Do you have any idea how the U.S. project
is proceeding? FitzBelmont wrote. Potter didn’t. He wished he did. He didn’t think anyone in the Confederate States did. If someone did, the report would have come through him . . . wouldn’t it? If it didn’t, it would have gone only one place: straight to Jake Featherston. The President knew Potter was loyal to the CSA—otherwise, he wouldn’t have got involved in this uranium business in the first place. So everyone else in the country was probably as ignorant as he was about Yankee progress, if any.
Featherston didn’t seem to have found out he and Nathan Bedford Forrest III had met, there in Capitol Square. If the President did know, neither man would still be free. Potter’s first thought was that neither would still be alive. After a moment, he realized that wasn’t necessarily so. Some of the people Ferd Koenig bossed could keep a man alive and hurting for a long, long time before they finally gave him peace—or maybe just made a mistake and hit him too hard or once too often.
Potter rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter on his desk and started an answer to Professor FitzBelmont. If he worked on something important, he wouldn’t have to think about some of the people who took the Attorney General’s orders. Dear Professor, he typed, I hope you and your fmaily are well. The error in the first sentence assured FitzBelmont the letter really came from him: a simple code, but an effective one. Thank you for your recent letter, which I have just received. I wish I were more familiar with the Japanese project you mention, but I am afraid I cannot tell you how close they are to invading the Sandwich Islands.
That, of course, was also code. It might be obvious to anyone who intercepted the letter that Potter wasn’t talking about Japan. What he was talking about wouldn’t be so obvious, though. He wondered if the Japanese were working on nuclear fission. They weren’t white men, but they’d proved they could play the white man’s game. He shrugged. That wasn’t his worry. It was probably the USA’s nightmare. If one bomb could wreck Pearl Harbor or Honolulu, how did you defend them?
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