In At the Death sa-4

by Harry Turtledove

  "I'm all ears," Morrell said.

  "Prevailing winds," Abell told him. "These bombs spew poison into the air, and the wind can carry it a long way. From Petrograd, the stuff goes deeper into Russia. From London or Paris, the Germans could give themselves a present."

  "A present they want like a hole in the head," Morrell said. John Abell nodded. Morrell stubbed out his cigarette and shuddered. "That makes these damn things even worse than I thought."

  "The only thing worse than using them on somebody is somebody else using them on you," Abell said.

  "Have we stopped the Confederates from using one on us?"

  "We hope so."

  "What's that supposed to mean?" Morrell asked.

  "They're working on this thing in a Virginia mountain town. We have bombed it so heavily, next to nothing is left aboveground," the General Staff officer replied.

  Morrell had listened to a lot of presentations. He could hear what wasn't said as well as what was. "What are they doing underground?"

  "Well, we don't precisely know." Abell sounded as uncomfortable as he ever did. "They've burrowed like moles since the bombing started. That's why I hope we've kept their program from producing a uranium bomb, but I can't be sure we have."

  "Terrific," Morrell said. "How do we find out for sure?"

  "If they use one on us, we failed," Abell said. "It's as simple as that, I'm afraid."

  "Oh, boy," Morrell said in distinctly hollow tones. "That's encouraging." He looked up at God only knew how many feet of steel and concrete over his head. "If they drop one on Philadelphia, will it get us all the way down here?"

  "I don't think they can do that, anyhow," Abell replied. "I'm told a uranium bomb is too heavy for any airplane they have. We're having to modify our bombers to carry the load."

  "Mm. Well, I guess that's good news. So they've got to wait till their rockets get out of short pants, then? Or do they have an extra-special rocket ready to go?"

  "We don't believe so," John Abell said. "But then, we didn't know about the ones they do have till they started firing them at us."

  "Tell you one thing," Morrell said as he lit another cigarette. Abell made a questioning noise. Morrell explained: "You sure know how to cheer a guy up."

  Y ankee bombers still didn't come over Lexington, Virginia, very often in the daytime. C.S. fighters and heavy flak made that an expensive proposition. Clarence Potter thanked God for small favors. He would have thanked God more for big ones, but the Deity didn't seem inclined to give the Confederate States any of those nowadays.

  A crane swayed a crate into the cargo bed of a truck that looked ordinary but wasn't. This machine had a very special suspension. Even so, the springs groaned as the crate came down.

  Potter watched the loading process with Professor Henderson FitzBelmont. "You're sure this damn thing will work?" Potter said.

  FitzBelmont looked at him. "No."

  "Thanks a lot, Professor," Potter said. "You sure know how to cheer a guy up."

  "Would you rather have me lie to you?" FitzBelmont asked.

  "Right now, I really think I would," Clarence Potter told him. "I hate to try this if there's an even-money chance we'll get nothing but a squib."

  FitzBelmont shrugged. "It's untested. Ideally, we would have more time and more weapons. Things being as they are…"

  "Well, yes. There is that," Potter said. Just getting back to Lexington from Petersburg had been nightmare enough. "All right. We'll try it, and we'll see what happens, that's all. Wish us luck."

  "I do," Professor FitzBelmont said. "In my own way, I'm a patriot, too." His way wasn't so different from Potter's. Neither man went around shouting, Freedom! They both loved the Confederate States all the same.

  Potter climbed into the cab of the truck next to the driver, a sergeant. "We ready, sir?" the noncom asked in accents not much different from Potter's own.

  "If we're not, we never will be-which is, of course, always a possibility," the Intelligence officer said. The sergeant looked confused. "We're ready, Wilton," Potter assured him. "Now we see what happens."

  Several command cars and armored cars rolled north and slightly east with the special truck. Everybody in them spoke the same kind of English as Clarence Potter: all the men could pass for Yankees, in other words. Both sides had used that trick during the war whenever they thought they could get away with it. One more time, Potter thought. It's coming down toward the end, but we're going to try it one more time.

  In the War of Secession, Stonewall Jackson had played the Shenandoah Valley like a master violinist. In his hands, it turned into a dagger, an invasion route aimed straight at the USA's heart. The same thing happened again during the Great War, with the Confederate charge that almost got to Philadelphia. After 1917, the United States occupied the northern end of the Valley and fortified it so the Confederate States couldn't try that again. And Jake Featherston didn't; he drove up through Ohio instead.

  The Shenandoah Valley was also the CSA's granary. The United States, busy elsewhere and fighting for survival, hadn't tried to take the Valley away from the Confederacy. They had dropped a hell of a lot of incendiaries on it. One U.S. wag was supposed to have said that a crow flying up the Shenandoah Valley would have to carry its own provisions.

  Things weren't quite so bad as that-but they sure weren't good. Potter drove past too many fields whose main crops were ash and charcoal, past too many barns and farmhouses that were nothing but burnt-out skeletons of their old selves. Even after a wet winter, the air smelled smoky.

  He had bigger worries than the way the air smelled. The first time they came to a bridge, he said, "This is what they call a moment of truth."

  "Sir?" Sergeant Wilton said. "They're supposed to have strengthened it."

  "I know." Potter left it right there. The Confederate States were in their death agony. He knew it, even if Wilton didn't. Things that were supposed to get done might…or they might not. You never could tell. And if they didn't…I'm screwed, Potter thought. Only one way to find out. "Take it across," he said.

  "Yes, sir." The driver did. The bridge held. Potter breathed a sigh of relief. Now-how many more bridges across the winding Shenandoah before they got to the head of the Valley? How many bridges beyond that? Again, only one way to find out.

  They made it over, again and again. The truck's transmission and engine weren't happy; they'd been beefed up, too, but they were even more overstrained than the suspension. If the damn thing crapped out…well, they had some spare parts, but it wouldn't be good news.

  Potter tensed again-for the millionth time-when they came into Luray, the northernmost town in the Valley the CSA held, just as the sun was setting. If things there weren't ready, they were screwed again. But the stuff they needed was waiting for them. Potter let out one more sigh of relief.

  But for the caves outside of town and a nitrates plant that had drawn its share of U.S. bombs, Luray's chief claim to fame was a two-and-a-half-story brick courthouse near the center of town. Potter's convoy stopped there. A work crew dashed out and spread canvas over the truck and the vehicles accompanying it. Then, under that cover, they got to work, slapping green-gray paint over the butternut that had identified them. As soon as the paint was even close to dry, they put U.S. markings all over the machines. Those couldn't hide their Confederate lines, of course, but after almost three years of war both sides were using lots of captured equipment.

  And the disguise didn't end with the truck and the armored cars and command cars. Potter and his comrades put on U.S. uniforms. He became a major, which suited him well enough. If the damnyankees captured him in their togs, they'd shoot him. He shrugged. At the moment, that was the least of his worries.

  "You have the passwords and countersigns?" he asked the veteran first sergeant in charge of the unit there.

  "Yes, sir, sure do. We went out and took a couple of prisoners less than an hour ago," the noncom answered. He was of about Potter's vintage, a man who'd been through the Gr
eat War and didn't flabble about anything. He gave Potter what he needed.

  Potter wrote it down to be sure. "Thanks," he said. The retread sergeant nodded. The patch over his left eye and the hook sticking out of his left tunic cuff told why he was in a backwater like this. Despite them, he was a better man than most at the front.

  The chameleon convoy rolled out of Luray before sunup. Potter wanted to get into U.S.-held territory while it was still dark. That would help keep his vehicles from giving themselves away right where people were most likely to get antsy about them.

  Yankee country started just a couple of miles north of Luray. If somebody'd spilled the beans-not impossible with the CSA visibly coming to pieces-a couple of companies of real U.S. soldiers could have swooped down and ended a lovely scheme before it really got rolling.

  But no. The sergeant's raid for prisoners hadn't even made the U.S. forces jumpy. Potter and his merry band got several miles into Yankeeland before they came to a checkpoint. The passwords he'd picked up in Luray worked fine. A kid second lieutenant asked, "What is all this crap, uh, sir?"

  "Matйriel captured from Featherston's fuckers," Potter answered crisply-he knew what the enemy called his side. "We're taking it north for evaluation."

  "Nobody told me," the shavetail complained.

  "It's a war," Potter said with more patience than he felt. "They wouldn't tell you your name if you hadn't had it issued ahead of time."

  "No shit!" the lieutenant said, laughing. "All right, sir-pass on."

  On they passed. The sun came up. They crossed over the Shenandoah again at Front Royal. Nobody on their side had specially reinforced that bridge. "Think it'll take the strain, sir?" Wilton asked.

  "If they ever sent a barrel over it, it will," Potter said. "Barrels are a hell of a lot heavier than this baby."

  They made it. They stopped at a fuel dump and gassed up, then went on. The farther they got from the front line, the less attention U.S. soldiers paid them. They just seemed to be men doing a job. One nine-year-old kid by the side of the road gaped, though. He knew they were driving C.S. vehicles-Potter could tell. He probably knew every machine and weapon on both sides better than the guys who used them did. Plenty of kids like that down in the CSA, too. It was a game to them. It wasn't a game to Clarence Potter.

  Harpers Ferry. John Brown had come here, trying to start a slave uprising. Robert E. Lee led the men who captured him. And, three years later, Lee came through again on the campaign that won the Confederate States their independence. Maybe this trip north would help them keep it.

  Over the Potomac. Into Maryland. Into the USA proper. Potter had come this way almost exactly thirty years earlier, with the Army of Northern Virginia's thrust toward Philadelphia. They'd fallen short then. Had they taken the de facto capital, they might have had a triumphant six weeks' war. Jake Featherston had hoped for the same thing this time around. What you hoped for and what you got weren't always the same, dammit.

  Maryland looked prosperous; Pennsylvania, when they got there, even more so. Oh, Potter spied bomb damage here and there, but only here and there. This land hadn't been fought over the way so much of the CSA had. It had got nibbled, but not chewed up. The United States was too big a place for bombing alone to chew them up. Pittsburgh, now, Pittsburgh probably looked as if it had had a proper war, but Potter and his band of cutthroats headed east, not west.

  Drivers in military vehicles coming the other way waved to him and honked their horns as they passed. He always waved back. They figured he was returning from the front with something important. Nobody bothered checking his papers or asking him where he was going or why. The United States were a big place. Once beyond the usual military zone, security for people who looked and sounded like U.S. soldiers eased off. He'd counted on that when he put this scheme together.

  Jake Featherston wanted him to go all the way into downtown Philadelphia. He didn't intend to. There of all places, security would tighten up again. He couldn't afford to have anybody ask questions too soon. Some overeager goon with a Tommy gun or a captured automatic Tredegar could mess everything up if he got suspicious at just the wrong time.

  No, not downtown. Potter stopped west of it, on the far side of the Schuylkill River. At his order, Wilton pulled into a parking lot. Potter ducked into the back of the truck and set two timers on the side of the crate-he wasn't going to take chances with only one. The driver, meanwhile, raised the hood.

  "What's going on?" somebody called.

  "Damn thing's broken down," Wilton answered. "We've got to round up a mechanic somewhere."

  He and Potter jumped into one of the command cars. "Back the way we came," Potter said. "Fast as you can go." He eyed the man who'd questioned them. The fellow only shrugged and ambled into a shop. Maybe he'd seen breakdowns before.

  "How long, sir?" asked the corporal behind the command car's wheel.

  "Not long enough," Potter said. "Step on it."

  Fifteen minutes later, the world blew up behind them.

  I rving Morrell wasn't looking west when the bomb went off. He was standing at a counter, trying to decide between a chocolate bar and a roll of mints. All of a sudden, the light swelled insanely, printing his shadow on the wall in back of the sidewalk stand. The fat little old woman behind the counter screeched and covered her eyes with her hands.

  "Good God!" Morrell said, even before the roar of the explosion reached him. His first thought was that an ammo dump somewhere had blown sky high. He didn't think of a bomb. The explosion seemed much too big for that.

  He forgot about the candy and ran out into the street. Then he realized just how lucky he'd been, because a lot of windows had turned to knife-edged flying shards of glass. The magazine stand and snack counter where he'd been dithering didn't have a window of any sort, so he'd escaped that, anyhow.

  He stopped and stared. He wasn't the only one. Everybody out there was looking west with the same expression of slack-jawed disbelief. No one had ever seen anything like that rising, boiling, roiling cloud before. How high did it climb? Three miles? Four? Five? He had no idea. The colors put him in mind of food-salmon, peach, apricot. The top of the cloud swelled out from the base, as if it were a toadstool the size of a god.

  The roar came then, not just in his ears but all through his body. He staggered like a drunken man. But it wasn't his balance going; the ground shook under his feet. A blast of wind from nowhere staggered him. Also out of nowhere, rain started pelting down. The drops were enormous. They left black splashes when they hit the ground. When one hit his hand, he jerked in surprise-the rain was hot.

  "Where's it at?" somebody asked.

  "Across the river, looks like," a woman said.

  It looked that way to Morrell, too. The rain shower didn't last more than a couple of minutes. It hadn't ended before he started trying to scrub the filthy drops from his skin. He remembered what John Abell had told him a few days before: uranium bombs put out poison. And what else could that horrible thing be? No ammunition dump in the world blew up like that.

  How much poison was in the rain? How much was in that monstrous toadstool cloud? Am I a dead man walking? he wondered.

  "We gotta go help," said the man who'd asked where the blast was. He hurried toward the Schuylkill River.

  His courage and resolve shamed Morrell. Of course, the stranger-who was plump and fiftyish, with a gray mustache-didn't know what Morrell did. If ignorance was bliss…

  After a moment's hesitation, Morrell followed. If he was already poisoned, then he was, that was all. Nothing he could do about it now. Overhead, that cloud grew taller and wider. Winds began to tear at it and tug it out of shape…and blow it toward downtown Philadelphia.

  Crowds got worse the farther west Morrell went. Everybody was pointing and staring and gabbling. You fools! Don't you realize you might all be dead? No, Morrell didn't shout it out. But it filled his thoughts.

  Damage got worse the farther west he went, too. All the windows that had survive
d years of Confederate air raids were blown out. Motorcars and trucks had windows shattered, too. Drivers, their faces masks of blood, staggered moaning through the streets. Many of them clutched at their eyes. Morrell knew what that was bound to mean: they had glass in them.

  As he neared Philadelphia's second river, he saw buildings brutally pushed down and vehicles flipped onto their sides or upside down. Some men stopped to help the injured. Others pressed on.

  And then Morrell got a chance to look across the Schuylkill. That part of the city was almost as heavily built up as downtown. Or rather, it had been. Next to Morrell, a skinny woman crossed herself. He felt like doing the same thing. Almost everything over there was knocked flat. A few buildings that must have been uncommonly strong still stood up from the rubble, but only a few.

  A bridge across the Schuylkill survived, though it leaned drunkenly to one side. How long it would stay up, God only knew. People staggered across it from the west. Some had had the clothes burned off of them. Morrell saw several with one side of their face badly seared and the other fine: they must have stood in profile to the bomb when it went off.

  "His shadow!" a dreadfully burned man babbled. "I saw his shadow on the sidewalk, all printed like, but not a thing left of George!" He slumped down and mercifully passed out. Morrell wondered whether he would ever wake. He might be luckier not to.

  A loudspeaker started to blare: "All military personnel! Report at once to your duty stations! All military personnel! Report at once to-"

  Morrell didn't exactly have a duty station. He headed back to the War Department. The catastrophe across the river was bigger than any one man. And he had a better chance of finding out what was going on at the military's nerve center.

  So he thought, anyway. But one of the guards who patted him down asked, "What the hell happened, sir? Do you know?"

  "Not exactly," Morrell answered. "I was hoping people here did."

  Before a private took him down to John Abell's office, he paused in a men's room and washed off as much of the filthy rainwater as he could. "Why are you doing that, sir?" asked the kid, who went in with him.