XIII
Jake Featherston felt trapped. The skies over North Carolina had been lousy with damnyankee fighter-bombers coming down from the north. Now that he’d crossed into South Carolina, the skies were lousy with damnyankee fighter-bombers coming up from the south. He and the handful of loyalists who clung to him through thick and thin moved by night and lay up by day, like any hunted animals.
Only chunks of the Confederate States still answered to the Confederate government: pieces of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina; the part of Cuba that wasn’t in revolt; most of Florida; most of Sonora and Chihuahua (which, cut off by the goddamn treasonous Republic of Texas, might as well have been on the far side of the moon); and a core of Mississippi, Louisiana, and most of Arkansas. If the war would go on, if the war could go on, it would have to go on there.
One thing wrong: Jake hadn’t the faintest idea how to reach his alleged redoubt. “What are we going to do?” he demanded of Clarence Potter. “Jesus H. Christ, what can we do? They’re squeezing us tighter every day, the bastards.”
“O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams,” Potter answered.
“What the hell is that?” Jake said.
“Shakespeare. Hamlet.”
“Hot damn! I don’t need to go back to school now, thank you kindly.” Featherston glared at the longtime foe who’d done him so much good. “What are you doing here, anyway? Why don’t you give yourself up to the USA? You can tell ’em you’ve hated my guts since dirt.”
“If things were different, I might,” Potter said calmly. “But I’m the guy who blew up Philadelphia, remember. And I did it wearing a Yankee uniform, too.”
“I’m not likely to forget.” Jake’s laugh was a hoarse, harsh bark. “You got out again, too, in spite of everything. I bet those sons of bitches are shitting rivets on account of it.”
“Bad security,” Potter said. “If we had another superbomb, we could get it up there.”
That made Featherston cuss. They would have another bomb in a few months—if the United States didn’t overrun Lexington first, which seemed unlikely. Henderson FitzBelmont had moved heaven and earth to make one superbomb. Now, when the CSA needed lots of them, he got constipated. You couldn’t count on anybody—except yourself. Always yourself.
“But now the United States want to kill me worse than you ever did,” Potter went on. “And they’ve got an excuse, because I wore their uniform. So in case they find out who I am, I expect I’m dead. Which means I’m all yours, Mr. President.”
“All mine, huh? Then why the devil ain’t you a redheaded gal with legs up to here?”
“You can’t have everything, sir. You’ve still got Ferd Koenig along for the ride, and you’ve still got Lulu.”
She sat in a different motorcar, parked under some trees not far away. Jake looked over in that direction to make sure she couldn’t overhear before he said, “She’s a wonderful woman in all kinds of ways, but not that one. I do believe I’d sooner hump me a sheep.”
“Well, she doesn’t do anything for me, either, but she worships the ground you walk on,” Potter said. “God knows why.”
“Fuck you, too,” Featherston said without rancor. “She’s a good gal. I don’t want to make her unhappy or anything, so she better not hear that from you.”
“She won’t. I don’t play those kinds of games,” Potter said, and Jake decided to believe him. The Intelligence officer wasn’t usually nasty in any petty way. After a moment, Potter went on, “You know, you’re right—you are nice to Lulu. You go out of your way to be nice to Lulu. How come you don’t do that with anybody else?”
There was a question Jake had never asked himself. Now he did, but he only shrugged. “Damned if I know, Potter. It’s just how things worked out, that’s all. I like Lulu. Rest of the world’s full of assholes.”
“I wish I could tell you you were wrong,” Potter said. Airplanes droned by overhead—Yankee airplanes. They were going to hit something farther north. Columbia was already in U.S. hands, so they could drop their load on North Carolina and then land in Virginia. With a sigh, Potter asked, “How are we going to make it out West? Do you think we can get an Alligator to land anywhere near here? Do you think it could fly across Georgia and Alabama without getting shot down?”
“Wouldn’t bet on it,” Jake answered mournfully. “What I was thinking was, if we put on civvies and make like we’re a bunch of guys who gave up, we can say we’re going home and sneak across what the damnyankees are holding, and they won’t be any wiser. How do you like it?”
Potter pursed his lips. “If we can’t get an Alligator, maybe. If we can, I believe I’d sooner fly at night and take the chance of getting blown out of the sky.”
Jake scowled at him. Potter looked back unperturbed, as if to say, Well, you asked me. He was one of the few men who never sugarcoated their opinions around the President of the CSA. Reluctantly, Featherston respected him for that. And he was too likely to be right, damn him. “I’ll see what we can come up with,” the President said.
When his shrunken entourage drove into Spartanburg, South Carolina, he found the colonel in charge of the town’s defenses lost in gloom. “Damnyankees are on the way, and to hell with me if I know how to stop ’em,” the officer said.
“Do your best,” Jake answered. “Now let me get on the horn to Charlotte.” That was the closest place where he thought he was likely to find a transport. And he did. And, after some choice bad language, he persuaded the authorities there to fly it down to Spartanburg.
“If it gets shot down—” some officious fool in Charlotte said.
“If it doesn’t get here, you’ll get shot down.” Jake wasn’t sure he could bring off the threat. But the jerk up in Charlotte couldn’t be sure he couldn’t.
The Alligator landed late in the afternoon. Ground crew personnel swarmed out with camouflage nets to make it as invisible as they could. “Do we really want to do this?” Ferd Koenig asked.
“If you don’t, then stay here,” Featherston answered. “Say hello to the U.S. soldiers when they catch you.” The Attorney General bit his lip. He got on the airplane with everybody else.
“Don’t know exactly how we’ll land if we have to do it in the dark,” the pilot said.
“You’ll work something out,” Jake told him.
“Well, I sure as hell hope so.” But the pilot didn’t sound too worried. “One thing—if I think this is crazy, chances are the damnyankees will, too. Maybe we’ll surprise ’em so much, we’ll get through ’em just like shit through a goose.”
“Now you’re talking. You take off in the wee small hours,” Jake said. “Fly low—stay under the Y-ranging if you can. Goddammit, we aren’t licked yet. If we can just make the enemy see that occupying our country is more expensive than it’s worth, we’ll get their soldiers out of here and we’ll get a peace we can live with. May take a while, but we’ll do it.”
He believed every word of it. He’d been fighting his whole life. He didn’t know anything else. If he had to lead guerrillas out of the hills for the next twenty years, he was ready to do it. After so many fights, what was one more? Nothing to faze him—that was for sure.
After they got airborne, the pilot asked, “Want me to put on my wing lights?”
“Yeah, do it,” Jake answered. “If the Yankees see ’em, they’ll reckon we’re one of theirs. I hope like hell they will, anyway.”
“Me, too,” the pilot said with feeling, but he flicked the switch. The red and green lights went on.
The Alligator droned south and west—more nearly south than west at first, because neither the pilot nor Jake wanted to come too close to Atlanta. If U.S. forces would be especially alert anywhere, they both figured that was the place.
Looking out of one of the transport’s small side windows, Jake had no trouble figuring out when they passed from C.S.-to U.S.-held territory. The blackout in the occupied lands
was a lot less stringent. The Yankees didn’t expect Confederate bombers overhead, damn them. And the worst part was, the Yankees had every right not to expect them. The Confederacy didn’t have many bombers left, and mostly used the ones it did have in close support of its surviving armies.
Turbulence made the Alligator bounce. Somebody gulped, loudly. “Use the airsick bag!” three people shouted at the same time. The gulper did. It helped—some.
And then turbulence wasn’t the only thing bouncing the Alligator. Shells started bursting all around the airplane. Suddenly, the road through the air might have been full of potholes—big, deep ones. A major general who wasn’t wearing a seat belt went sprawling.
“Get us the fuck out of here!” Jake yelled. If Lulu sniffed or squawked, he didn’t hear her.
Engines roaring, the transport dove for the deck. The antiaircraft guns pursued. Shrapnel clattered into the wings and tore through the fuselage. Somebody in there shrieked, which meant jagged metal tore through a person, too.
“We’re losing fuel!” the pilot shouted. “Lots of it!”
“Can we go on?” Jake had to bellow at the top of his lungs to make himself heard.
“Not a chance in church,” the pilot answered. “We’d never get there.”
“Can you land the son of a bitch?”
“If I can’t, we’re all dead,” the man answered. Jake remembered that he hadn’t been thrilled about landing at night even in Confederate-held territory. How much less enthusiastic would he be about a nighttime emergency landing on enemy soil? I told him to put on the wing lights, Jake thought. Did it matter? Too goddamn late to worry about it now.
He hated having his fate in somebody else’s hands. If he was going out, he saw himself trading bullets with the damnyankees and nailing plenty of them before they finally got him. This way…Dammit, I’m a hero. The script isn’t supposed to work like this.
“Brace yourselves!” the pilot shouted. “Belts on, everybody! I’m putting it down. I think that’s a field up ahead there—hope like hell it is, anyway. Anybody gets out, let Beckie know I love her.”
One of the engines died just before the Alligator met the ground—that was one hell of a leak, all right. The transport was built to take it and built to land on rough airstrips—but coming down in a tobacco field with no landing lights was more than anybody could reasonably expect.
But it got down. It landed hard, hard enough to make Jake bite the devil out of his tongue. One tire blew. The Alligator slewed sideways. A wingtip dug into the ground. The transport tried to flip over. The wing broke off instead. The fire started then.
“Out!” the pilot screamed. “Out now!” The airplane hadn’t stopped moving, but nobody argued with him. Jake was the second man out the door. He had to jump down to the ground, and turned an ankle when he hit. Swearing savagely, he limped away.
“Fuck!” he said in amazement. “I’m alive!”
Clarence Potter wondered how many nasty ways he could almost die. This blaze was a lot smaller than the radioactive fire he’d touched off in Philadelphia, but it was plenty big enough to give a man an awful fore-taste of hell before it finally killed him. To the poor chump roasting, how could any fire be bigger than that?
He heard Jake Featherston’s obscene astonishment from not far away. It summed up how he felt, too. He’d scrambled away from the burning Alligator right after the President of the CSA. Was everybody out? He looked at the pyre that had been a transport. Anybody who wasn’t out now never would make it, that was for damn sure.
“Where the hell are we?” Ferdinand Koenig’s deep voice came from over to the right.
“Somewhere in Georgia—I can’t tell you anything else.” That was the pilot. Nobody would have to deliver his message to Beckie…yet.
But they weren’t free and clear, not by a long shot. “Let’s get out of here,” Potter said. “This field will be swarming with Yankees in nothing flat.”
Some of the Confederate big shots weren’t going anywhere. “I think my leg is busted,” said the general who’d replaced Nathan Bedford Forrest III as chief of the General Staff. Potter couldn’t remember his name; as far as Potter was concerned, the officer wasn’t worth remembering. “I’m not going anywhere quick.”
“You can surrender, Willard. Don’t reckon they’re shooting soldiers—only politicians,” Jake Featherston said. “Just don’t tell ’em I’m around.”
“I wouldn’t do that, sir,” Willard said. First name or last? Potter wondered. Hell, it didn’t matter to anybody but Willard any more.
“General Potter is right,” Saul Goldman said. Potter blinked. He hadn’t even known the Director of Communications got on the Alligator. Goldman was so quiet and self-effacing, he could disappear in plain sight.
Lulu was hurt, too, hurt badly. “I don’t want the Yankees to get me, Mr. President,” she told Jake. “Will you please shoot me and put me out of my misery?”
“I don’t want to do that!” Featherston exclaimed.
“Please,” Lulu said. “I can’t go on. It’s the last thing you can do for me, since…Oh, never mind. You didn’t care about that, not with me.”
She knew what she was talking about. Jake had put it more pungently the afternoon before, but it amounted to the same thing. The President of the CSA muttered to himself. He started to turn away, then turned back. Potter had rarely seen him indecisive—wrong often, sometimes disastrously so, but hardly ever at a loss. “Christ,” he said under his breath.
“Hurry,” Lulu said. “You can’t stay here.”
Potter hadn’t imagined he would find Lulu agreeing with him, either. “Christ,” Jake said again, a little louder this time. Then he yanked the .45 out of the holster he always wore. He fired, and whispered, “Sorry, Lulu,” as he did. “Come on!” Now he almost shouted. “Let’s get the fuck away from here.”
They stumbled and limped through the field. The only light came from the burning Alligator, and they were trying to put it behind them as fast as they could. “That must have been hard, sir,” Potter said after a while: cold comfort, he realized as soon as he spoke, if any at all.
“Feels like I just shot my own luck,” Featherston answered, his voice rough with—tears? “That make any sense at all to you?”
“Sense? No,” Potter answered. As the President glared at him, he added, “I understand what you mean, though. Let’s hope you’re wrong, that’s all.”
“Yeah. Let’s.” Jake’s voice stayed harsh. “You know what? You’re liable to be our ace in the hole. We do run into damnyankees, you can talk for us, make ’em think we’re on their side.”
“I hope I can, anyhow,” Potter said. He’d done it up in the USA. If he couldn’t do it again—they were up the well-known creek, that was all. “I hope I don’t have to. I hope there aren’t any Yankees within miles.”
“That’d be nice.” Featherston didn’t sound as if he believed it was likely. Since Potter didn’t, either, he would have let it rest there. But Featherston went on, “Best thing we can do is get into some town the Yankees didn’t bother garrisoning. We borrow a couple of motorcars from loyal people, we can head west…. Wish to hell I knew just where we were at.”
Potter did. They were in trouble, that was where. Jake Featherston yelled for the pilot and asked him. “Somewhere east of Atlanta—can’t tell you closer,” he replied. “I was going to fly south a little while longer, then swing west. That’s about as good as I can do right now. Beg your pardon, sir, but I’m fuckin’ surprised I’m in one piece.”
“You did good, son,” Jake said—he was never shy about patting small fry on the back. That was probably one of the things that had helped him rise and kept him on top. “Yeah, you did good. So where’s a town?”
“Let’s find a road,” Potter said. “Sooner or later, a road’s got to take us into a town.” He didn’t say what kind of town a road would take them into. They just had to trust to luck on that. No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than Featherston�
��s mournful comment followed it.
He found the road by the simple expedient of stepping down into it. He came closer to hurting himself then, than he had in the Alligator’s crash-landing. “Which way?” Ferdinand Koenig asked. North or south, east or west? was supposed to follow that question, but Potter had no idea which direction was which. Evidently, neither did anyone else.
But there was the moon, a thin waning crescent, so that had to be the east. Which meant the North Star should be about…there. And there it was, with the rest of the Little Dipper curling from it.
Jake Featherston worked it out at the same time as Potter did. “This way,” he said, pointing. “We’ll keep on heading south, see what the hell happens.” He’d most likely spent more time in the field than anybody else here. He would be able to figure out which way was which as soon as he set his mind to it.
Down the road they went, a ragged squad, some hale enough, others limping. Most of them had pistols; one officer carried an automatic Tredegar. If Yankee soldiers came on them, they wouldn’t last long. Potter understood that perfectly well. He wondered how many of the others did.
He also wondered how long they could keep going. Sooner or later, their minor injuries would catch up to them. And more than a few of them were, to put it politely, not men accustomed to taking much exercise. Ferd Koenig, in particular, resembled nothing so much as a suet pudding in a gray Freedom Party uniform.
Potter realized they should have changed into civilian clothes before they got on the Alligator. Too late to worry about that now. Too late to worry about lots of things now. Would I be here if I’d managed to shoot Jake at the Olympics? No, of course he wouldn’t; the President’s bodyguards would have gunned him down. But maybe the country wouldn’t have been in the mess it was in.
Or maybe it would have—how could you tell? The Vice President in those days hadn’t been an amiable nonentity like Don Partridge. Willy Knight of the Redemption League wanted to do a lot of the same things Jake Featherston did. The only reason he didn’t get a chance was that the Freedom Party grew bigger faster. A couple of years later, he came close to assassinating Jake himself.
In at the Death Page 46