In at the Death

by Harry Turtledove

  “Great-grandfather. And no, he wouldn’t—he didn’t like tyrants any better than I do,” the suddenly former chief of the General Staff replied. He could talk a good game, but some games weren’t about talk, and he’d never figured that out.

  “Take him away,” Jake said. He didn’t want to argue with Forrest, and he didn’t have to, either. But the other man hadn’t the least idea what he meant. If the original Nathan Bedford Forrest planned a coup, he would have done it right. This smudgy carbon copy—hardly a Forrest at all in looks, except for the eyes—didn’t know the first thing about how to manage one.

  Away he went, perhaps too numb to realize yet what kind of hell he was heading for. Well, he’d find out pretty damn quick. The only thing that excused a plot was winning. Failure brought its own punishment.

  Jake went out into the antechamber. Lulu sat at her desk as calmly as if two Army men didn’t lie dead not ten feet away. “I knew you’d take care of that foolishness, Mr. President,” she said. “Shall we call somebody to get rid of this carrion?”

  “Mm—not quite yet,” Featherston answered. “Let me bring in some more men I’m sure I can count on.” The worst thing about having somebody mount a coup was being unable to trust the people around you afterwards.

  But if he couldn’t count on the Freedom Party Guards, he couldn’t count on anybody—and if he couldn’t count on anybody, Nathan Bedford Forrest III’s strike would have worked like a charm. Jake went back to the telephone on his desk. Had Forrest had the brains to suborn the operator and keep the President from getting hold of loyal troops? That might make things dicey, even now.

  But no. Within a minute, Featherston was talking with a regimental commander named Wilcy Hoyt, who promised to secure the Gray House grounds with his troops. “Freedom!” Hoyt said fervently as he rang off.

  Would the men who backed Forrest fight? Would they try to take Jake out, reckoning it was their best chance? In their shoes, Featherston would have done that. He still had his .45. But the pistol was there to protect him against a visitor who turned out to be an assassin. It wouldn’t help much against a squad of soldiers determined to do him in.

  As soon as he got off the telephone with Hoyt, he went out and grabbed an automatic rifle from one of the dead guards. Even that wouldn’t do him as much good as he wished, but it was better than the pistol. If he had to go down, he aimed to go down fighting.

  “Will there be more shooting, Mr. President?” Lulu asked.

  “Well, I don’t know for sure, but there may be,” Jake answered.

  “Hand me that other rifle, then,” his secretary said.

  Featherston stared at her as if she’d suddenly started speaking Swahili. “You know how to use it?”

  “Would I ask if I didn’t?” she said.

  He gave her the Tredegar. She could handle it, all right. And two rifles blasting anybody who tried to break in were bound to be better than one. “Where the devil did you learn something like this?” Jake inquired.

  “A women’s self-defense course,” Lulu answered primly. “I thought I’d be shooting at Yankees, though, not traitors.”

  “Rifle works the same either way,” Jake said, and she nodded. He supposed she’d feared assaults on her virtue. His own view was that any damnyankee who tried to take it would have to be desperately horny and plenty nearsighted, too. He would never have said anything like that, though. He liked Lulu, and wouldn’t hurt her for the world—which he wouldn’t have said about most people he knew.

  But the people who showed themselves at the doorway to the outer office were Freedom Party Guards: Featherston loyalists. Jake had the first few come in without their weapons and with their hands up. They obeyed. The obvious joy they showed at seeing him alive and in charge of things left him with no doubt that they were on his side.

  When they’d set up a perimeter outside the office, he began to feel more nearly certain things were going his way. “Get me another outside line,” he told Lulu. She nodded. Jake snorted in soft contempt. No, Nathan Bedford Forrest hadn’t known thing one about running a coup. Well, too goddamn bad for him. Jake got down to business: “Put me through to Saul Goldman.”

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Lulu said, and she did. That the Confederate Director of Communications remained free made Jake snort again. Didn’t Forrest know you couldn’t run a country without propaganda? Evidently he didn’t. He’d left the best liar and rumormonger in the business alone. Had Saul said no, how would Forrest have publicized his strike even if he pulled it off?

  No need to flabble about that now. “Saul? This here’s Jake,” Featherston rasped. “Can you record me over the telephone and get me on the air? We’ve had us a little commotion here, but we got it licked now.”

  “Hold on for about a minute and a half, sir,” the imperturbable Jew replied. “I need to set up the apparatus, and then you can say whatever you need to.” He took a bit longer than he’d promised, but not much. “Go ahead, Mr. President.”

  “Thank you kindly.” Jake paused to gather his thoughts. He didn’t need long, either. “I’m Jake Featherston, and I’m here to tell you the truth. Truth is that a few damn fools reckoned they could do a better job of running our precious country than me. Other truth is that the traitors were wrong, and they’ll pay. Oh, boy, will they ever…”

  Another new exec. Sam Carsten wondered what he’d get this time. He’d had one pearl of great price and one burr under the saddle. The powers that be might have told him to make do without. He could have done it, but it wouldn’t have been any fun. He would have had to be his own ogre instead of playing the kindly, benevolent Old Man most of the time.

  But a new officer had been chosen and brought down to the destroyer escort on a flying boat. And now Lieutenant Lon Menefee bobbed in the light swells of the South Atlantic as a real boat carried him from the seaplane to the Josephus Daniels.

  “Permission to come aboard, sir?” he called when the boat drew up alongside the warship. By the matter-of-fact way he said it, the Josephus Daniels might have been moored in the Boston Navy Yard, not out on her own God only knew how many hundred miles from the nearest land.

  “Permission granted,” Sam said, just as formally. A rope ladder tied to the port rail invited Lieutenant Menefee upward. He stood up in the boat, grabbed the ladder, and climbed steadily if not with any enormous agility.

  A couple of sailors stood by to grab him as he came over the rail. He turned out not to need them, which made Sam think better of him. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said with a crisp salute.

  “Good to have you aboard.” Returning the salute gave Carsten the chance to look him over. He liked what he saw. Menefee was in his late twenties, with a round face, a solid build, and dark whiskers that said he might have to shave twice a day. His eyes were also dark, and showed a wry amusement that would serve him well…if Sam wasn’t just imagining it, of course. Among the fruit salad on his chest was the ribbon for the Purple Heart. Pointing to it, Sam asked, “How’d you pick that up?”

  “A Japanese dive bomber hit my destroyer somewhere north of Kauai,” Menefee replied with a shrug. “I got a fragment in the leg. The petty officer next to me got his head blown off, so I was lucky, if you can call getting wounded lucky.”

  “All depends on how you look at things,” Sam said. “Next to not getting hurt, getting wounded sucks. But it beats the hell out of getting killed, like you said.”

  “Yes, sir.” Lieutenant Menefee cocked his head to one side. “I don’t mean this any way bad at all, sir, but you aren’t what I expected.”

  Carsten laughed. “If I had a nickel for every officer who served under me and said the same thing, I’d have…a hell of a lot of nickels, anyway. Who expects to run into a two-striper old enough to be his father?”

  “That’s not what I had in mind. Besides, I already knew you were a mustang,” Menefee said. “But you’re not…” He paused, visibly weighing his options. Then he plunged, like a man throwing a double-sawbuc
k raise into a poker game. “You’re not a hardass, the way I figured you might be.”

  He had nerve. He had smarts, too. If that had rubbed Sam the wrong way, it could have blighted things between skipper and exec from then on out. But Menefee had it right—Sam wasn’t a hardass, except every once in a while when he needed to be. “I hope not—life’s mostly too short,” he said now. “How come you had me gauged that way?”

  “Well, I knew the executive officer you had before didn’t last very long,” Lon Menefee said. “If you’re in my shoes, that makes you wonder.”

  “Mm, I can see that it would,” Sam allowed. “Why don’t you come to my cabin? Then we can talk about things without every sailor on the ship swinging his big, flapping hydrophones towards us.”

  “Hydrophones, huh?” Menefee’s eyes crinkled at the corners. His mouth didn’t move much, but Sam liked the smile anyway. “Lead on, sir. You know where we’re going.”

  “I’ll give you the grand tour in a bit,” Sam said. “Come on.”

  After he closed the door to the captain’s little cabin, he pulled a bottle of brandy and a couple of glasses from the steel desk by his bed. “Medicinal, of course,” Lieutenant Menefee observed.

  “Well, sure,” Sam said, pouring. “Good for what ails you, whatever the devil it is.” He handed the new exec one of the glasses. “Mud in your eye.” They both drank. The brandy wasn’t the best Sam had ever had—nowhere close. But it was strong, which mattered more. “So you want to hear about the old exec, do you?”

  “If I’m going to sail these waters, sir, shouldn’t I know where the mines are?”

  “That seems fair enough,” Sam said, and told him the story of Myron Zwilling. He finished, “This is just my side of it, you understand. If you listen to him, I’m sure you’d hear something different.” One corner of his mouth quirked upward. “Yeah, just a little.”

  “I’ll bet you one thing, sir,” Menefee said: “He wouldn’t figure the story had two sides. He’d tell me his was the only one, and he’d get mad if I tried to tell him anything different.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Sam said. Zwilling hadn’t had any doubts. Sure as hell, that was part of his problem. “Do you see things in black and white, or are there shades of gray for you?”

  “I hope there’s gray,” Menefee said. “Black and white make things easier, but only if you don’t want to think.”

  That sounded like the right answer. But did he mean it, or was he saying what he thought his new skipper wanted to hear? I’ll find out, Sam thought. Aloud, he said, “Things aboard ship are pretty much cut-and-dried right now. They’ll stay that way, too, I hope, unless we need to pick another prize crew.”

  “I’ll be all right with that,” Menefee said. “I just got here, so I don’t know who doesn’t like me and who really can’t stand me. Those are about the only choices an exec has, aren’t they?”

  “Pretty much,” Sam said. “Is this your first time in the duty?”

  “Yes, sir,” the younger man replied. By the way he said it, a second term as executive officer wouldn’t be far removed from a second conviction for theft. Maybe he wasn’t so wrong, either. Didn’t a second term as exec say you didn’t deserve a command of your own?

  “Just play it straight, and I expect you’ll do fine,” Carsten said, hoping he was right. “Pretty soon you’ll have a ship of your own, and then somebody else will do your dirty work for you.”

  Menefee grinned. “I’ve heard ideas I like less—I’ll tell you that. But I don’t know. The war’s liable to be over before they get around to giving me my own command, and after that the Navy’ll shrink like nobody’s business. Or do you think I’m wrong, sir?”

  “It worked that way the last time around—I remember,” Sam said. “This time? Well, who knows? After we get done beating the Confederates on land, we’ll still need ships to teach Argentina a lesson, and England, and Japan. One of these days, the Japs’ll have to learn they can’t screw around with the Sandwich Islands.”

  “Can we go on with the little fights once the big one’s over? Will anybody care, or will people be so hot for peace that they don’t give a damn about anything else?”

  “We’ll find out, that’s all,” Sam said. The questions impressed him. Plainly, Lon Menefee had an eye for what was important. That was a good asset for an executive officer—or anybody else. “All we can do is what they tell us to do,” Sam went on, and reached for the brandy bottle. “Want another knock?”

  “No, thanks,” Menefee said. “One’s plenty for me. But don’t let me stop you.”

  “I’m not gonna do it by myself.” Sam put the bottle back into the desk drawer. He eyed Menefee, and wasn’t astonished to find the new officer eyeing him, too. They’d both passed a test of sorts. The exec would have a friendly drink, but didn’t care to take it much further than that. And Menefee had seen that, while Sam didn’t live by the Navy’s officially dry rules, he wasn’t a closet lush, either. And neither of them had said a word about it, and neither would.

  As the desk drawer closed, Menefee said, “Will you give me the tour, then, and let me meet some of the sailors who won’t be able to stand me?” He spoke without rancor, and in the tones of a man who knew how things worked—and that they would work that way no matter what he thought about it. The slightly crooked grin that accompanied the words said the same thing. Sam approved, having a similar view of the world himself.

  He took Menefee to the bridge first. Thad Walters had the conn, which meant a petty officer was minding the Y-ranging screens. The Josephus Daniels just didn’t carry a large complement of officers. When Sam told the new exec that the chief hydrophone operator was a CPO, Menefee raised one eyebrow but then nodded, taking the news in stride.

  “Lots of antiaircraft guns. I saw that when I came aboard,” Menefee remarked when they went out on deck.

  “That’s right, and I wish we carried even more,” Sam said. “The only ship-to-ship action we’ve fought was with a freighter that carried a light cruiser’s guns. We whipped the bastard, too.” Sam remembered the pride—and the terror—of that North Atlantic fight. “Most of the time, though, airplanes are our number-one worry. Way things are nowadays, warships can’t get close enough to shoot at other warships. So, yeah—twin 40mm mounts all over the damn place, and the four-inchers are dual purpose, too.”

  “Sure. They’ve got more reach than the smaller guns.” Lieutenant Menefee nodded. “Things look about the same to me. If we don’t find some kind of way to keep bombers off our backs, the whole surface Navy’s liable to be in trouble.”

  “During the Great War, everybody flabbled about submersibles. This time around, it’s airplanes. But as long as we bring our own airplanes with us, we can fight anywhere. And the carriers need ships to help keep the bad guys’ airplanes away from them, so I figure we can keep working awhile longer, anyhow.”

  “Sounds good to me, sir.” Menefee gave him another of those wry grins.

  When they got to the engine room, the new exec started gabbing with the black gang in a way that showed he knew exactly what he was talking about. “So you come from engineering?” Sam said.

  “Shows a little, does it?” Menefee said. “Yes, that’s what I know. How about you, sir?”

  “Gunnery and damage control,” Sam answered. “We’ve got the ship covered between us—except for all the fancy new electronics, I mean.”

  “Most of the guys who understand that stuff don’t understand anything else—looks that way to me, anyhow,” Menefee said.

  “Me, too,” Carsten agreed. “If you can figure out all the fancy circuits, doesn’t seem likely you’ll know how people work. I wouldn’t want one of those slide-rule pushers in charge of a ship.” But then he stopped himself, holding up his right hand. “Thad’s an exception, I think. He can make the Y-ranging gear sit up and roll over and beg, but he’s a damn good officer, too. You’ll see.”

  “He’s mighty young. He’s had the chance to get used to it
right from the start,” Menefee said. Sam nodded, carefully holding in his smile. To his eyes, Lon Menefee was mighty damn young, too. But the new exec was right—there were degrees to everything. Young, younger, youngest. Sam couldn’t hide the smile any more. Where the hell did old fart fit into that scheme?

  Not Richmond, not any more. Richmond was a battleground. Basically, everything north of the James was a battleground—except for what had already fallen. And the damnyankees had a couple of bridgeheads over the river, too. They hadn’t tried to break out of them, not yet, but the Confederates couldn’t smash them, either. And so, when Clarence Potter left Lexington to report to Jake Featherston on what the physicists at Washington University were up to, he headed for Petersburg instead of the doomed capital of the CSA.

  Getting to Petersburg was an adventure. Getting anywhere in the Confederacy was an adventure these days. But the Confederate States had hung on to equality in the air in northern Virginia, Maryland, and southern Pennsylvania longer than they had anywhere else. They’d hung on, and hung on, and hung on…till they couldn’t hang on any more. That was how things stood now.

  Antiaircraft guns still blazed away at strafing U.S. fighters and fighter-bombers. But antiaircraft guns were just annoyances. What really held enemy aircraft at bay were your own airplanes. And the Confederates didn’t have enough to do the job any more.

  His motorcar went off the road several times. It raced for a bridge once, and hid under the concrete shelter with bullets chewing up the ground to either side till the aerial wolves decided they couldn’t get him and went off after other, easier game. Then, cautiously, the driver put the butternut Birmingham in gear.

  “Some fun, huh?” Potter said.

  The look the PFC at the wheel gave him told him how flat the joke fell. “Hope to Jesus whatever the hell you’re doin’ on the road is win-the-war important,” the kid said. “If it ain’t, we got no business travelin’, on account of the damnyankees’re too fuckin’ likely to shoot our dicks off. Sir.”