Saul Goldman had his hands clapped over his face—maybe he’d been looking the wrong way. Jake stared north in open-mouthed awe, even when a quick, fierce, hot blast of wind almost knocked him ass over teakettle. That toadstool cloud rising high into the sky was the most terrifying thing he’d ever seen, but it had a strange and dreadful beauty of its own.
Goldman took his hands away. He blinked. Tears ran down his face. “I can see you—sort of,” he said. “Is…this what we did to Philadelphia?”
“Yeah.” Jake’s voice was soft and dreamy, almost as if he’d just had a woman. He might not have been able to stop the damnyankees from making their bomb, but in spite of everything he’d finished ahead of them. Both sides had staggered over the finish line. Still, the CSA won first prize.
“Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’may rabo…” Saul went on in a language Jake didn’t know.
The President of the CSA hardly noticed. He’d struck first, and he’d struck at the enemy capital. Newport News? He snapped his fingers. Who cared?
X
I’m Jake Featherston, and I’m here to tell you the truth.” The voice coming out of the wireless set and the boundless arrogance it carried were absolutely unmistakable. The President of the CSA went on, “If the Yankees reckoned they’d blow me up when they dropped their fancy bomb, they reckoned wrong, and they went and killed a big old pile of innocent women and babies, the way the murderers always do.”
“Damn!” Flora Blackford turned off the wireless in disgust. Blasting Jake Featherston off the face of the earth was the only way she saw to end this war in a hurry. Blasting Newport News off the face of the earth had its points, but it was only one town among many.
The lies Featherston could tell! To listen to him, the U.S. uranium bomb was designed solely to slaughter civilians. What about the one his men had touched off right across the Schuylkill from downtown Philadelphia? Well, that one was an attack against the U.S. government and military. It was if you believed Featherston, anyhow. Of course, if you believed Featherston there you also likely believed him when he said ridding his country of Negroes was a good idea, when he said the USA had forced him into war, and when he said any number of other inflammatory and improbable things.
If Jake Featherston said he believed in God, it would be the best argument Flora could think of for either atheism or worshipping Satan, depending. She nodded to herself and wrote that down on a notepad. It would make a good line in a speech.
One thing Featherston had said even before the U.S. uranium bomb went off did seem to be true, worse luck: the United States hadn’t caught the Confederate raiders who’d brought the bomb north. Flora supposed those raiders wore U.S. uniforms and could sound as if they came from the USA. All the same, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War would have to look into the Army’s failure to hunt them down.
But the Joint Committee had something else on the agenda this morning. They were going across the Schuylkill for a firsthand look at what the explosion of a uranium bomb was really like.
As she took a cab to Congressional Hall to meet with her colleagues, she couldn’t help noticing that a lot of west-facing buildings had their paint scorched or seared off. On some, the paint had come through intact only in patterns: taller structures closer to the blast had shielded part of the paint but not all.
“They say we blew that Featherston item right off the map,” the driver remarked. He seemed healthy enough, but he was at least ten years older than Flora, which put him in his mid-sixties at the youngest.
“It isn’t true,” she answered. “I just heard him on the wireless.”
“Oh,” the cabby said. “Well, that’s a…darn shame. Don’t hardly see how we’ll get anywhere till we smoke his bacon.”
“Neither do I,” Flora said sadly. “I wish I did.”
When the cab pulled up in front of Congressional Hall, she gave him a quarter tip, which pleased him almost as much as seeing Jake Featherston stuffed and mounted would have. “Much obliged, ma’am,” he said, touching a forefinger to the patent-leather brim of his cap. He was grinning as he zoomed away.
Flora wasn’t surprised to find Franklin Roosevelt there with the members of the Joint Committee. “First we’ll see what one of these damn things can do,” he said. “Then you’ll rake me over the coals for not getting ours first and for not keeping the Confederates from finishing theirs.”
“Did you think they could beat us to it?” she asked.
He shook his big head. “No. I didn’t think they had a prayer, to tell you the truth. They’re formidable people. All the more reason for squashing them flat and making sure they never get up again.”
“Sounds good to me,” Flora said.
They went to the Schuylkill in a bus. Two Army officers helped Roosevelt out of his wheelchair and into a seat, then manhandled the chair aboard. “Considering some of the terrain we’ll be crossing, maybe I should have brought a tracked model,” he said, sounding a lot more cheerful than Flora could have under the same circumstances.
The bus didn’t cross at the closest bridge. Some of the steel supporting towers on that one had sagged a bit, and Army engineers were still trying to figure out whether it would stay up. The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War had to chug north to find one that was sound. Then the bus went back south and west till wrecked buildings and rubble in the road made the driver stop.
“We’re not quite a mile from the center of the blast,” one of the officers said. “It gets worse from here.”
He wasn’t wrong. It got worse, and worse, and worse again. Before long, only what had been the stoutest, sturdiest buildings had any walls standing at all. Even they weren’t just scorched but half melted in a way Flora had never imagined, much less seen.
One of the Army officers pushed Franklin Roosevelt forward. When the rubble got too thick to let the man advance with the Assistant Secretary of War, his colleague would bend and grab the front of the wheelchair. Together, the two would get Roosevelt over the latest obstacle and push him on toward the next.
Steel and even granite lampposts sagged like candles in the hot sun. How hot had it been when the bomb went off? Flora had no idea—some physicists might know. Hot enough, plainly. Hot enough and then some.
Somewhere between half a mile and a quarter of a mile from what the officers were calling ground zero, there was no sidewalk or even rubble underfoot. Everything had been fused to what looked like rough, crude glass. It felt like hard, unyielding glass under Flora’s feet, too.
“My God,” she said over and over. She wasn’t the only one, either. She watched a Catholic Congressman cross himself, and another take out a rosary and move his lips in prayer. When you saw something like this, what could you do but pray? But wasn’t a God Who allowed such things deaf to mere blandishments?
“Can the Confederates do this to us again?” someone asked Roosevelt.
“Dear Lord, I hope not!” he exclaimed, which struck Flora as an honest, unguarded response. He went on, “To tell you the truth, I didn’t think they could do it once. But they’ve got an infiltrator—his name’s Potter—who’s so good, he’s scary. We think he led their team. And so…they surprised us, damn them.”
“Again,” Flora said.
Roosevelt nodded. “That’s right. They surprised us again. They almost ruined us when they went up into Ohio, and then they did…this. But do you know what? They’re going to lose the war anyway, even if we didn’t fry Jake Featherston like an egg the way he deserves.”
“Why didn’t we?” a Senator asked.
“Well, we had intelligence he was in the Hampton Roads area, and I still believe he was,” Roosevelt replied. “But he wasn’t right where we thought he was, which is a shame.”
“Why didn’t we catch the people who did this?” Flora said. “The ones who brought the bomb up here, I mean. The wireless has been saying we haven’t, and I want to know why not. They can’t play chameleon that well…can they?”
“It seems they can,” Roosev
elt said morosely. “Just before I joined you at Congressional Hall, I had a report that Confederate wireless is claiming the bombers got out of the United States. I can’t confirm that, and I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to, but I do know we don’t have them.”
“Yes, I’ve heard the Confederates making the same claim.” Flora kicked at the sintered stuff under her feet. “We don’t have any witnesses, do we?”
“None who’ve come forward,” Franklin Roosevelt said. “I’m sure there were some, but when a bomb like this goes off…” He didn’t finish. Flora nodded anyhow. When a bomb like this went off, it took a whole neighborhood with it. Anyone who saw the truck—she supposed it was a truck—the bomb arrived in and wondered about it died in the blast.
“From now on, they’ll be calling the police and the bomb squad any time anything bigger than a bicycle breaks down,” a Congressman said.
“That’s already happened,” Roosevelt said. “It’s got cops all over the country jumping like fleas on a hot griddle, but I don’t know what we can do about it. People are nervous. And I’m afraid they’ve got a right to be.”
“Anyone need to see anything else?” the Army officer behind him asked. When nobody said yes, the man started pushing Roosevelt back toward the bus.
The members of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War went back, too. The bus took them east over the Schuylkill to Philadelphia General Hospital, the closest one to survive the blast. The Pennsylvania Hospital for Mental and Nervous Diseases, only a couple of blocks from ground zero, was now as one with Nineveh and Tyre: a tallish lump in the melted glass, no more.
“I think you people are a bunch of ghouls to rubberneck here,” a harried doctor said. “And I think you were crazy or stupid or both at once to rubberneck over there. Don’t you know that goddamn bomb left some kind of poison behind? We’ve had plenty of people who weren’t too bad, and then their hair falls out and they start bleeding internally—and out their noses and eyeballs and fingernails and, uh, rectums, too—and they just up and die. You want that?”
“Nobody told us,” a Senator said faintly.
“Nu? Now I’m telling you,” the doctor said. “And now I’ve got to do some work.”
Hearing that was plenty for Flora, but some of her colleagues wanted to see what the doctor was talking about. She went with them, and ended up wishing she hadn’t. People with ordinary injuries were heartbreaking enough, and the bomb caused plenty of those. If a window shotgunned you with knifelike shards of glass, or if your house fell down on you and you had to lie in and under the ruins till somebody pulled you out, you weren’t going to be in great shape.
But there were others, worse ones, who made her have a hard time sleeping that night, and for several nights afterwards. The people with what the nurses called uranium sickness, which had to be what the doctor described. And the burns…There were so many burns, and such horrible ones. How many hands with fingers fused together did she see, how many faces with melted noses, how many moaning sufferers with eyes boiled out of their heads?
She was glad to escape. She didn’t have the stomach for such things. One of her colleagues said, “Well, at least we’ve paid the Confederates back for this.”
By then, the members of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War were climbing into their bus. Flora pointed back to the hospital. “I’m sure that makes the people in there very happy,” she said.
The Congressman gave her an odd look. “I don’t believe your heart’s in this any more,” he said. “You’ve been a rock since the start. Why not now?”
“Because now I’ve seen the difference between enough and too much,” Flora answered. “And what these bombs do is too much.” She looked a challenge at him. “Go ahead—tell me I’m wrong.” He didn’t. He couldn’t. She hadn’t thought he would.
Abner Dowling had dreamt of seeing Richmond in his professional capacity ever since his West Point days. Those were long behind him now, but here he was, striding through the streets of the captured Confederate capital with not a care in the world…except for breaking his neck in the rubble, stepping on a mine, setting off a booby trap, or getting shot by one of the snipers who still haunted the ruins.
He turned to his adjutant. “You know, it’s a funny thing,” he said.
“What’s that, sir?” Angelo Toricelli was sporting silver oak leaves instead of gold on his shoulders—the spoils of victory.
“We mashed this damn place flat, but next to what happened to Philadelphia and Newport News it’s nothing but small change.”
“Oh.” The younger officer nodded. “Well, we had to do it the hard way, not all at once. If they’d held out a little longer, though…”
“Wouldn’t have broken my heart,” Dowling said. “I know that sounds cold, but it’s the Lord’s truth. A superbomb’s about the only thing that would have got these people’s attention.”
As if to underscore the point, somebody with an automatic weapon opened up in the distance. Dowling started to dive for cover, then checked himself: none of the bullets came anywhere near. A shattered storefront nearby had FREEDOM! painted on it. That graffito and CSA were everywhere in Richmond. The locals didn’t like the idea of living under the Stars and Stripes for the first time since 1861.
Something moved back behind the storefront. Dowling’s hand dropped to the .45 on his belt. It wasn’t much of a weapon against an automatic Tredegar, but it was what he had. Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli’s pistol leaped from its holster. “Come out of there!” he barked.
The kid who did couldn’t have been much above seven years old. He looked at the green-gray uniforms, then asked, “You a couple of nigger-lovin’ damnyankees?” Before Dowling or Toricelli could answer, the kid went on, “Got any rations? I’m mighty hungry.”
“Why should we feed you if you call us names?” Dowling asked.
“What names?” The little boy didn’t get it. He’d probably never heard U.S. soldiers called anything else. He rubbed his belly. “Gimme some rations. Y’all got any deviled ham?”
“Here, kid.” Toricelli took a can out of a pouch on his belt and tossed it to the boy. “Now you got some. Scoot.” The boy disappeared with his prize. Looking faintly embarrassed at himself, Toricelli turned to Dowling. “Maybe he’ll grow up civilized.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Dowling said, “but don’t hold your breath.”
High overhead, a swarm of bombers flew south like wintering birds. Below the James, the Confederates still fought as stubbornly as they could. If they wouldn’t give up, what was there to do but keep pounding them till they didn’t have any choice? Dowling wished he could see something, but he couldn’t.
“Once we win, do we really want to try to run this place?” he asked, speaking more to God than to his adjutant.
But his adjutant was the one who answered: “What choice have we got, sir?”
Dowling wished he knew what to say to that. If the USA beat the CSA, what happened next? As far as Dowling could see, the USA had two choices. The United States could leave an independent Confederacy, or they could reunite North America under the Stars and Stripes. An independent Confederacy was dangerous. What had just happened to Philadelphia told how dangerous it was.
But if Virginia returned to the USA…well, what then? If all these states that had been their own nation for eighty-odd years returned to the one from which they’d seceded, wouldn’t they spend years trying to break away again? Wouldn’t there be guerrillas in the mountains and the woods? Wouldn’t there be people bombs in the cities? Wouldn’t the locals send Freedom Party bastards to Congress, the way Kentucky and Houston had between the wars?
“Winning this goddamn war will be almost as bad as losing it would have been,” Dowling said in a voice not far from despair.
“That crossed my mind, too, sir,” his adjutant said. “How many of these sons of bitches will we have to kill?”
“As many as it takes,” Dowling answered. “If we don’t kill any more than that
just for the fun of it, our hands are…pretty clean, anyway.”
He had to look around to orient himself. The United States had knocked most of Richmond flat, while the Confederate defenders had flattened much of the rest. They’d fought hard. They never seemed to fight any other way. But there hadn’t been enough of them to keep U.S. soldiers from breaking in.
Jefferson Davis. Robert E. Lee. Stonewall Jackson. Old Pete Longstreet. Woodrow Wilson. The famous Confederates of ages past had to be spinning in their graves—unless U.S. bombs had already evicted them. A pity Jake Featherston wasn’t spinning in his. Well, the time for that was coming.
“You know, sir, in a way they’re lucky here,” Lieutenant Colonel Toricelli said.
“Oh, yeah? How’s that?” Dowling asked.
“It’s like I said before—if they’d kept fighting a little longer, they would have had a uranium bomb come down on their heads. Then they’d think what’s left here was paradise by comparison.”
“Well, you’re bound to be right about that,” Dowling said. “Except most of them wouldn’t be doing any thinking—”
“Like they do anyway,” his adjutant put in.
That stopped him, but only for a second. “Because they’d be dead,” he finished. A lot of them already were. The stench in the air left no doubt of that.
Stench or no stench, though, he’d done something a lot of the most important people in U.S. history never managed. He’d remembered long-gone Confederate dignitaries before. Now Lincoln and McClellan, James G. Blaine and John Pope, and Teddy Roosevelt and George Custer sprang to mind. Not a one of them had ever set foot in Richmond. But here I am, by God! Dowling thought proudly.
“General! Hey, General Dowling, sir!” somebody behind him yelled. “Guess what, sir!”
“That doesn’t sound so good,” Angelo Toricelli said.
“No, it doesn’t.” Slowly, ponderously, Dowling turned. “I’m here. What is it?”
“Guess what?” the soldier said again, but then he told what: “We just found a whole family of nig—uh, Negroes, all safe and sound.”
In at the Death Page 35