“Sorry, sir. No offense, but you’re not my type,” Cooley answered. They both laughed.
Antonio Jones looked from one of them to the other. “This ain’t funny, amigos,” he said. “What that Featherston bastard is doing to colored people in my estado, it’s a shame and a disgrace. We got to go to the mountains and fight back.”
“Sorry, Mr. Jones.” Sam didn’t think he’d ever called a Negro mister before, but orders were to treat him like a big shot. “We know your people are in trouble. We’re not laughing about that. But my crew is in trouble, too, and it will be till we get back into U.S. waters.” And even after that, he added, but only to himself. “We can laugh about that. We’d go nuts if we didn’t, chances are.”
“Ah. Now I understand.” Jones sketched a salute. “All right, Senor Capitan. We do this, too, against our worries.”
The sun sank into the sea with tropical abruptness. No long, lazy twilights in these latitudes; darkness came on in a hurry. Pat Cooley had the conn as the Josephus Daniels approached the Cuban coast. Sam didn’t want to risk the ship in any way he didn’t have to. What they were doing was already risky enough by the nature of things.
“One patrol boat where it’s not supposed to be could ruin our whole day,” Cooley remarked.
“All the guns are manned, and Y-ranging should let us see him before he sees us,” Sam said. “With luck, we’ll sink him before he gets word off about us.”
Cooley nodded. Sam wondered how much luck they’d already used up when those C.S. seaplanes believed they were what they pretended to be. Did they have enough left? He’d find out before long.
Y-ranging gear also let them spot the Cuban coast. Although it was blacked out, the darkness wasn’t so thorough as it would have been farther north. U.S. bombers weren’t likely to visit here. Eyeing what had to be two fair-sized towns, Sam said, “That’s Guardalavaca to starboard, and that has to be Banes to starboard. We are where we’re supposed to be. Nice navigating, Mr. Cooley.”
“Thank you very much, sir,” the exec said.
Sailors were hauling crates of rifles and submachine guns and machine guns and cartridges up on deck. Soon they’d be lowered into the Josephus Daniels’ boats and brought ashore…if the destroyer escort got the recognition signal she was supposed to.
That thought had hardly crossed Carsten’s mind before three automobiles on a beach aimed their headlights across the water in the warship’s general direction. Antonio Jones breathed a sigh of relief. Sam breathed another one. Anxiety tempered his-were they sailing into a trap? He had to find out.
“Thank you, sir,” the black Cuban answered. “God willing”-he crossed himself-“the Partido de Libertad here will have some new worries.” They went out on deck together. Sailors in ersatz Confederate uniforms swung crate after crate down into the waiting boats. Jones continued, “It is not as much white man against black man here as it is on the mainland of the CSA. There are many of mixed blood on this island, and even some whites help us as much as they can.”
“Good. That’s good, Mr. Jones.” Sam did his best to pronounce it the way the Negro did. He was uneasily aware that his own country wasn’t doing everything it could to help the Negroes in the Confederate States. Well, the United States were doing something. The proof of that was right here. Sailors scrambled down nets to board the boats and take the guns and ammo ashore.
Antonio Jones went to the port rail to go down himself. “I hope you stay safe, Capitan Carsten,” he said.
“I hope you do, too,” Sam said. “Maybe after the war’s done, we’ll get together and talk about it over a beer.”
“I hope so, yes.” Jones sketched a salute and swung himself over the rail. He descended as nimbly as any sailor. Motors chugging, the boats pulled away from the Josephus Daniels and went in toward the beach.
Nothing to do but wait, Sam thought. He would rather be doing. He’d smuggled arms into Ireland himself. He knew the ploy worked right away. If firing broke out on the beach now…Well, in that case I’m screwed, too.
The boats came back after what felt like years. His watch insisted it was more like forty-five minutes. Sailors hoisted the boats up one after another. “Smooth as rum, sir,” said one of the men back from the beach. The simile made Sam suspicious, or more than suspicious. Remembering the good Irish whiskey he’d downed in the last war, he said not a word.
“Goddamnedest thing you ever saw, too,” a grizzled CPO added. “They had this kid running things on the beach. If he was a day over sixteen, I’m a nigger. But he knew what was what, Fidel did. He gave orders in that half-Spanish, half-English they talk here, and people jumped like you wouldn’t believe. He was a white kid, too, not a smoke like Mr. Antonio Jones.”
“Jones said whites and blacks were in it together down here,” Sam said. “Do we have all the boats aboard? If we do, we better get out of here.”
They did. The Josephus Daniels made for the open ocean. Aboard her, sailors put on their own uniforms for the first time since setting out from Boston. They started dismantling the sheet-metal camouflage that turned her into a Confederate ship. When morning came, they would give her a proper paint job, too. They couldn’t bring her back into U.S. waters looking the way she did, not unless they wanted her sent to the bottom in short order.
“We got away with it,” Sam said to Pat Cooley.
“Did you think we wouldn’t, sir?” Cooley asked.
“Well, I’m damn glad we did,” Sam said, and let it go at that.
Clarence Potter fitted a new clip to his Tredegar automatic rifle. He worked the bolt to chamber the first round. That done, he was ready to empty the twenty-five-round clip into anything that looked even a little bit like trouble.
The Negro uprising in Richmond was having unexpected effects. One of them was reminding even officers who normally spent their time deep in the bowels of the War Department that war meant fighting, and fighting meant killing. Nathan Bedford Forrest III’s great-grandfather first said that, and the cavalry general from the War of Secession knew what he was talking about.
Small bands of blacks had managed to get out through the barbed-wire perimeter that was supposed to seal the colored quarter off from the outside world. Bombed-out buildings gave them hiding places uncountable during the day. When night fell, they came out and shot whoever they could find. Rumor said a Negro’d come close to killing Jake Featherston. Potter didn’t know if he believed rumor. He didn’t know how he felt about it even if it was true, either. He didn’t love the President of the CSA, but he knew the country needed him.
His own foxhole was just inside the colored district. “Come on!” he shouted to the Confederate soldiers entering the perimeter. “They’re shooting back from over there, and from over there, too.” The Virginia Confederate Seminary ordained black preachers; it was as close to an institution of higher learning as Negroes could have in the CSA. For now, its large, solid buildings made a splendid strongpoint for Negroes armed with old-fashioned bolt-action Tredegars, sporting rifles, shotguns, pistols, and whatever else they could get their hands on.
They even had a few mortars, perhaps captured, perhaps homemade, perhaps sneaked in by the damnyankees. But what they had was no match for the artillery, barrels, and air power the Confederacy used against them, to say nothing of the ground troops clearing them out one block, one building, at a time.
More Confederates, some in gray, some in butternut, led a long column of black captives out of the colored district. Any time a Negro hesitated, a soldier or Freedom Party guard shot him-or her. If Asskickers bombed apartment blocks into rubble, who could say how many people died in the explosions or in the fires that followed? And who cared, except the Negroes themselves? Anybody blown to bits now didn’t need shipping to a camp later. Population reduction came in all different flavors.
Antiaircraft guns started going off. Clarence Potter swore and dove into a foxhole. The Yankees sent fighters into Richmond whenever they could. Helping the black uprising was
good for them, just as helping the Mormons helped the CSA. But the U.S. border was much closer to Richmond than the Confederates were to Salt Lake City. Too bad, Potter thought.
The U.S. fighters came in low, the way they always did. They blasted whatever they could, then roared off. A few bullets slammed into the sandbags that helped strengthen Potter’s foxhole. Dirt leaked out of them and onto him.
Leaking dirt he didn’t mind. Leaking blood was a different story. Potter straightened up again when he was reasonably sure the enemy airplanes were gone. A latecomer shot past then, but didn’t open up on him. He let out a sigh of relief. That could have been…unpleasant.
“Potter!” someone yelled. “Potter!”
“I’m here!” Clarence Potter shouted back. By Jake Featherston’s orders, no one named anyone else’s rank inside the perimeter. Shouting out for a general only made the man a tempting target for snipers. Quite a few officers and even noncoms didn’t wear their rank badges for the same reason. Potter did, but more from a sense of fussy precision than out of vanity.
He kept calling till the runner found his foxhole. “Here you are, sir,” the man said, and handed him a sealed envelope.
“Thanks,” Potter said. Things did happen outside this colored district, though proving as much wasn’t easy, not when the capital was on fire. He broke the seal, took out the papers inside it, read through them, and nodded to himself. “So that’s ready to get going, is it?”
“I don’t know what you mean, sir,” the runner said. “Do I need to take an answer back to anybody?”
“No, that’s all right. This just lets me know something’s going to happen. You can leave,” Potter answered. The young Confederate soldier didn’t seem sorry to disappear. No doubt he would have been happier running messages through the War Department’s miles of underground corridors. Potter couldn’t blame him. Rifle and machine-gun bullets hardly ever flew down those corridors. Here, now…
Well, he’d got this message where it needed to go. Potter lit a match and burned it. Confederate bombers flying out of extreme northwestern Sonora were going to try to hit the U.S. uranium works in western Washington. It was a gamble in all kinds of ways. Other C.S. bombers taking off at the same time would head toward Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Denver. With luck, the damnyankees’ fancy electronics-better than anything the CSA had-would make them concentrate on those other bombers, not on the ones that really counted.
With a little more luck, the bombers would do some real damage when they got over the target. They had to fly a long way to get there: something on the order of 1,200 miles. The Confederacy didn’t have long-range heavy bombers that could carry a big bomb load that far and then turn around and fly home. If the war broke out in 1945, say, instead of 1941, the Confederacy probably would have such airplanes. But the country needed to use what it could get its hands on now.
Even starting out with a light bomb load, those bombers wouldn’t be coming home again. They would land at a strip on Vancouver Island, a strip of whose existence the United States were-Potter fervently hoped-ignorant. Assuming everything went the way it was supposed to, pilots and aircrews would eventually get smuggled back to the Confederacy. Canadian rebels would wreck the aircraft so the USA couldn’t learn much from them. (So the Canucks claimed, anyhow. If they found people to fly those birds against the damnyankees, Potter suspected they would. He didn’t mind. He wished them luck.)
Assuming everything went the way it was supposed to…Clarence Potter laughed, not that it was funny. Things had a habit of going wrong. Any soldier, and especially any soldier in the intelligence business, could testify to that.
He laughed again. Assuming everything went the way it was supposed to, Richmond’s Negroes would all be in camps by now. Assuming everything went the way it was supposed to, Potter himself would be back under the War Department figuring out sneaky ways to make life miserable for the damnyankees and to keep them from making it miserable for his own country. That knowledge didn’t give him any great faith things would go the way they were supposed to.
But the Confederate States had to try. The United States started the race towards uranium sooner, and they were running faster. They had more trained people to attack the problem, and they had more industrial capacity to spare from straight-out, short-term war production.
“Thank you, Professor FitzBelmont,” Potter muttered, there in his foxhole. Who would have thought an unworldly physicist would see something a spymaster missed? Physics was FitzBelmont’s business, but all the same…
Even if everything did go the way it was supposed to, how long would this raid stall the United States? Days? Weeks? Months? Potter laughed at himself. He couldn’t know ahead of time. Neither could anybody else.
“The longer, the better,” Potter said. And that was the Lord’s truth. One raid on that facility might get through. A follow-up seemed unlikely to.
More Negroes came back past his foxhole. They were skinny and dirty. Despair etched their faces. They’d done everything they could to hold off the Confederate authorities. They’d done everything they could, and it wasn’t enough. Plenty of their friends and loved ones lay dead in the rubble from which they were pulled, and now they were going off to the camps in spite of everything.
Potter felt like waving good-bye to them. He didn’t-that was asking for a bullet. But the temptation lingered. Too bad, fools!
Of course, if the damnyankees won this war as they’d won the last one, they would jeer the Confederates the same way. And they would have won the right. Potter tried to imagine what the Confederate States would be like with U.S. soldiers occupying them. He grimaced. It wouldn’t be pretty. The Yankees got soft after the Great War. They paid for it, too. They weren’t as dumb as most Confederates thought they were. They weren’t dumb enough to make the same mistake twice in a row. If they came down on the CSA this time around, they’d come down with both feet.
Of itself, Potter’s gaze swung to the west, toward Washington University. How were Professor FitzBelmont and his crew of scientists doing? How much time did they need? How far ahead of them were their U.S. opposite numbers? How long would the C.S. bombers set the damnyankees back?
There. He was back where he started from. He had lots of good questions, and no good answers.
Rattling and clanking, a couple of Confederate barrels ground forward against the rebellious Negroes. They were obsolescent machines left over from the early days of the war: only two-inch guns, poorly sloped armor. Having to use them-and their highly trained crews-for internal-security work was galling just the same.
A machine gun in the ruins of a grocery opened up on the barrels. That wasn’t a C.S. weapon; it came from the USA. Its slower rate of fire made it immediately recognizable. Potter cursed under his breath. Yes, the damnyankees helped the Negro revolt in the CSA, the same as the Confederates helped the Mormons. But the Mormon uprising was fizzling out, while Negroes went right on causing trouble.
Bullets ricocheted off the forward barrel’s turret and glacis plate, some of them striking sparks from the armor. Even experienced soldiers tried to knock out barrels with machine guns, and it couldn’t be done. A Confederate infantryman fired an antibarrel rocket into the battered store. The machine gun suddenly fell silent. Antibarrel rockets were made for piercing armor plate. Confederate soldiers had quickly discovered they also made excellent housebreakers.
The barrels clattered on. When somebody with a rifle fired at them, the lead barrel sprayed the house from which he was shooting with machine-gun fire. But that rifleman was only a distraction. A skinny Negro kid-he couldn’t have been more than fourteen-leaped up onto the second barrel, yanked open the hatch over the cupola, and threw in a Featherston Fizz.
A C.S. foot soldier with a submachine gun cut him down a moment later-a moment too late. Flames and black, greasy smoke burst from all the turret hatches. The gunner got out, but he was on fire. He took only a few steps before crumpling to the ground, and writhed like a moth that f
lew into a gas flame.
Then the barrel brewed up as its ammunition cooked off. Fire burst from it. Potter knew the commander and loader were stuck in there. He didn’t think the driver or bow gunner got out, either.
Five good men gone. Five men who wouldn’t fight the USA again. Five men the CSA couldn’t afford to lose-but they were lost. Clarence Potter swore one more time. To his way of thinking, this proved the Confederacy had to get rid of its Negroes. What did they do but cause trouble and grief?
What the Confederacy might be if it treated Negroes like men and women rather than beasts…never even crossed his mind.
VII
Flora Blackford was listening to a Navy captain testifying about support for black rebels in the Confederate state of Cuba when a page approached her and whispered, “Excuse me, Congresswoman, but you have an urgent telephone call outside.”
“Who is it?” she whispered back. This wasn’t the most exciting testimony the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War had ever heard, but it was important.
“Assistant Secretary Roosevelt,” the page answered.
“Oh.” Flora got to her feet. “Please excuse me,” she told her colleagues. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
The page led her to one of the telephones outside the hearing room. “He’s on this line.”
“Thank you.” Flora picked up the handset and said, “This is Congresswoman Blackford.”
“Hello, Flora,” Franklin Roosevelt said. “Can you come by here?”
“Right this minute?” she asked.
“Well, you might want to,” Roosevelt answered. And what did that mean? Something like, If you don’t you’ll be sorry. Flora couldn’t think of anything else it was likely to mean.
“On my way,” she said, and hung up. “Please apologize to the rest of the committee for me,” she told the page. “I’m afraid I need to confer with the Assistant Secretary of War.” The young man nodded and hurried away. Flora wondered what kind of connections he had, to be wearing a sharp blue suit instead of a green-gray uniform. She also wondered how long he would go on wearing his suit. Congressional pages did get conscripted. At least one had got killed.
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