Before long, whoever was in the other motorcar spotted the one that held Morrell and his driver. Whoever he was, he kept on coming. Maybe that meant he was an innocent, though what an innocent would be doing sneaking over the border was beyond Morrell. More likely, it meant he hadn’t recognized the command car for what it was.
As the two machines got closer, Morrell’s driver said, “They’ve got a lot of people in there—and what’s that one bastard sticking out the window?”
A muzzle flash said it was a rifle. Nothing hit the command car—not for lack of effort, Morrell was sure. “Which side of the border is he on, do you think?” he asked.
“If he’s shooting at me, he’s on the side where I can shoot back,” Satcher answered without hesitation.
“I like the way you think,” Morrell said. The fellow with the rifle in the other motorcar fired again. This time, a bullet slammed into the command car. It must not have hit anything vital, because the machine kept running, and no steam or smoke or flame burst from its innards.
Morrell squeezed the machine gun’s triggers. Brass cartridge cases flew from the breech and clattered down around his feet. Tracers guided the stream of bullets towards and then into the other motorcar. Smoke immediately poured from its engine compartment. It skidded to a stop. The doors on the far side flew open. Several men got out and ran. A bullet knocked one of them down. Another man shot at Morrell from behind the automobile. Morrell hosed bullets back at him. The motorcar caught fire. The rifleman had to pull away from it. That made him an easier target. Down he went, too.
And once the auto started burning, it didn’t want to stop. As soon as the flames reached the passenger compartment, ammunition started cooking off. Some of the rounds were tracers. They gave the fire a Fourth of July feel.
“Ha!” Charlie Satcher said. “They were running guns.”
“Did you expect anything different?” Morrell asked. The driver shook his head.
A bullet cracked past Morrell’s head. That wasn’t one from the fireworks display in the motorcar—it had been deliberately aimed. He ducked, not that that would have done him any good had the round been on target. He’d known only a handful of men who could go through a fire fight without that involuntary reaction. It wasn’t cowardice, just human nature.
He tapped the driver on the back and pointed. “Go around there and give me a better shot at that fellow.”
“Right.” Satcher steered the car in the direction Morrell indicated. The rifleman from the auto coming out of Texas scrambled away, trying to keep the burning vehicle between the command car and himself.
That scramble proved his undoing. He was behind the trunk when either the fire or one of the rounds going off in the passenger compartment reached what the men from Texas had been carrying there. The explosion sent flaming chunks of motorcar flying in all directions. One slammed down about a hundred feet in front of the command car; Satcher almost rolled it steering clear.
No more aimed shots came, though Morrell needed a little while to be sure of that, because rounds did keep cooking off every now and then with a pop-pop-pop that would have been merry if he hadn’t known what caused it. He got a look at the Texan who’d been shooting at him, and wished he hadn’t. The rear bumper had torn off the man’s head and his left arm.
The grim sight didn’t unduly upset his driver. “For all I care, they can bury the bastard in a jam tin,” Satcher said, “either that or leave him out for the buzzards. If I was a buzzard, I’d sooner eat skunk any day of the week.”
His words seemed to come from a long way off. Firing the machine gun left Morrell’s ears temporarily stunned. He hoped the stunning was temporary, anyhow. Some of it probably wasn’t. He knew he didn’t hear as well as he had when he was younger. Would he go altogether deaf in another ten or twenty years? He shrugged. Not much he could do about that. It wasn’t the rarest ailment among soldiers.
“Sir?” Charlie Satcher said.
“What is it?” Morrell’s own voice seemed distant, too.
“I heard you had balls,” the driver answered. “The guy who told me, though, he didn’t know the half of it.”
Morrell shrugged. The motion told him how tense his shoulders had got in the fire fight. He didn’t think of himself as particularly brave. When the shooting started, he didn’t think much at all. Reaction took over. “They started it, Charlie,” he answered.
“Yeah,” Satcher said admiringly. “And you sure as hell finished it.”
“I wonder which side of the border we’re on.” Morrell shrugged again. “Doesn’t matter much, not when their auto went up like that. Nobody can say they weren’t running guns into Houston.”
“Damn well better not try,” the driver said. “Me, I thought I was gonna shit myself when that goddamn back seat landed in front of us.”
“Back seat? Is that what it was?” Morrell said. Charlie Satcher nodded. Morrell managed a laugh. “I’ve got to tell you, I didn’t notice. I was busy just then. You did a hell of a job getting around it. I noticed that.”
“Neither one of us would’ve been real happy if I hit it,” Satcher said. Morrell couldn’t very well argue with that. The driver asked, “Shall we head on back to Lubbock, sir?”
“I think we’d better,” Morrell replied. “I want to report to General MacArthur, and he’ll want to report to the War Department. I suppose they’ll report to the president, or maybe to the State Department. Somebody will have to figure out how loud we squawk.”
“Squawk, hell,” Satcher said. “We don’t scream our heads off, they deserve to roll like that last Confederate fucker’s.”
Morrell only shrugged. “I won’t tell you you’re wrong, but the people in Philly are liable to. Because I can tell you what Richmond’s going to say. Richmond’s going to say they didn’t know anything about these fellows, they didn’t have anything to do with them, and they aren’t responsible for them.”
“My ass,” Charlie Satcher said succinctly.
“Now that you mention it, yes,” Morrell agreed, and the driver laughed. But Morrell went on, “You know it’s crap, I know it’s crap, and Jake goddamn Featherston knows it’s crap, too, but how do you go about proving it’s crap?”
“Screw proving it,” Satcher said. “Blow the bastards to hell and gone anyway.”
“I do like the way you think,” Morrell said.
Brigadier General Abner Dowling remembered George Armstrong Custer. There had been times—a great many times—when Dowling’s dearest wish would have been to forget entirely the officer whose adjutant he’d been for so long. Things didn’t seem to work that way, though. All those years with Custer had marked him for life. Scarred him for life, he would have been inclined to say in his less charitable moments. This was one of those days.
When Dowling thought of Custer nowadays, he thought of the general after the Great War, when Custer had come back to Philadelphia to fill an office and count corks and write elaborate reports on the best deployment of paper clips in the U.S. Army. With nothing real, nothing important, to do, Custer had wanted to jump out of a window. Dowling often thought the only thing that stopped him was his office’s being on the ground floor.
And now Dowling knew exactly how his superior had felt. Since coming back from Salt Lake City after the occupation of Utah ended, he’d filled an office and written elaborate reports on the best way to transport rubber bands to combat units. That was how it seemed, anyhow. He was on the shelf, and he was damned if he knew how to get off again.
If he was going to be stuck in Philadelphia, he’d hoped the War Department might at least channel reports of what was going on in Utah through him. He’d spent a lot of years—a lot of thankless years—in the state. He wondered if Winthrop W. Webb was still in business, or if the Mormons had figured out who Webb’s real bosses were and arranged an accident for him.
Try as Dowling would, he couldn’t find out. Somebody in the War Department was surely tending to affairs in Utah. Whoever it was, it was
n’t Dowling. He couldn’t even find out who it was. The only thing his efforts to find out got him was a visit from Lieutenant Colonel John Abell.
The more Dowling saw the General Staff officer, the less he liked him, even though Abell had been the one who’d told him he’d made general-officer grade. The man was slim and pale—downright bloodless, in fact. Had the U.S. Army been made up of ghosts rather than men, he would have been one of the handsomest ones in it. As things were, he made Dowling want to turn up the heat in the office even though the day was warm.
“Sir, you have been poking your nose into matters that do not concern you,” Abell said. “We discourage that.”
We? You have a tapeworm? Dowling wondered. He remembered Irving Morrell talking about Abell during the war. At the time, he’d been sure Morrell was exaggerating. Now he found the other man had been speaking the gospel truth. He eyed the General Staff lieutenant colonel’s lean, pallid countenance and picked his words with care: “I don’t believe Utah’s affairs can fail to concern me, not when I was there so long.”
“If the War Department feels otherwise, why should you disagree?” Lieutenant Colonel Abell inquired.
“Because if I had anything to do with Utah, I could be useful to the Department,” Dowling answered. “With what people have me doing now—I mean, not doing now—I’m useless. Useful is better.”
“Don’t you trust the judgment of your superiors as to what is useful and what is not?” Abell asked silkily.
By the way spoke, he might have been one of those superiors, even if Dowling outranked him. General Staff officers, Dowling thought scornfully, and tried not to let his annoyance show. Even if Abell had a lower grade, he enjoyed much better connections. And so, still speaking carefully, Dowling said, “A quartermaster sergeant could do most of what I’ve been doing since I came back here, whereas I’ve got some specialized knowledge no sergeant can match. Using me without using that knowledge is inefficient.”
“Possibly,” Abell said, which meant he wasn’t about to admit it. “A pleasure talking to you.” He got to his feet and started for the door. With a hand on the knob, he turned back. “You know Colonel Morrell, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes.” Dowling nodded. “We worked together on the breakthrough that took Nashville.” That might have been impolitic, since the breakthrough had violated War Department doctrine on how to use barrels. Dowling didn’t much care, since it had also gone a long way toward making the Confederates throw in the towel.
“How interesting,” Lieutenant Colonel Abell said with a smile that displayed a lot of expensive dentistry. And then, silent as a specter, he was gone. Dowling wondered if he ought to have his office exorcised.
He’d hoped Abell’s questions would lead to something better in the way of work. For the next couple of weeks, his hopes were disappointed. He read about Irving Morrell’s encounter with gun runners on the border between Texas and Houston in the newspapers. Nobody in the War Department asked him about it in any official way. He wondered why Abell had bothered confirming that they were acquainted. The better to blackball me, he thought.
But, somewhat to his surprise, he did see the General Staff officer again. When John Abell next appeared—materialized?—in his office, the lieutenant colonel’s face bore a smile that seemed less than perfectly friendly. “So you are friends with Colonel Morrell, are you?” Abell said, a note of challenge in his voice. “And you’ve done the same sort of work, have you?”
Dowling hadn’t said he was friends with Morrell. He admired Morrell’s talent; what Morrell thought of him he wasn’t nearly so sure. But, sensing that a yes would annoy Lieutenant Colonel Abell more than a no, he nodded defiantly and said, “That’s right.”
“Very well, Brigadier General Dowling. In that case, I have some orders for you.” Abell spoke as if washing his hands of him.
To Dowling, anything would have been better than what he was doing now. “And those orders are . . . ?” he asked eagerly.
Abell heard that eagerness. It made him blink. By the fruit salad on his chest, he’d stayed in Philadelphia through the Great War. He no doubt thought his role more important than those of soldiers who actually went out and fought the enemy, too. He might even have been right, but Dowling didn’t care to dwell on that. “Sir, you will be sent to Kentucky,” he said now. “Your duty there will be similar to Colonel Morrell’s in Houston: you will help control agitation against the government of the United States. This does also relate to your experience in Utah, would you not agree?”
“Yes, I’d say that’s true,” Dowling answered cautiously. “You’re coming as close as you can without a real war to sending me into combat, aren’t you?”
“Isn’t that what you wanted?” Abell asked with sardonic satisfaction.
But that satisfaction slipped when Dowling gave him another yes instead of a no, saying, “You bet it is. I’ve wanted to get into the field for years. They wouldn’t take me away from Utah when we fought the Japs, dammit.”
“Well, you’re going to get your wish.” Lieutenant Colonel Abell plainly thought he was out of his mind.
“When do I leave?” Dowling asked. “Where exactly do I go? All over Kentucky, or somewhere in particular?”
“I don’t have the precise details yet,” Abell said. “I assure you, they will be passed on in good time. In the meanwhile, you are to continue with the duties you have already been assigned.”
“Thank you so much,” Dowling said sourly. The General Staff officer took no notice of his tone, which might have been just as well. Abell departed with a salute that mocked military courtesy instead of reinforcing it. Now Dowling was the one who ignored the slight. He would have ignored not only a slight but a large if that meant escaping from Philadelphia.
Knowing the speed at which the War Department moved, he expected in good time to mean a month or six weeks. In reality, he got his orders eleven days after Lieutenant Colonel Abell’s visit. On reflection, he was less surprised than at first glance. The military bureaucrats in War Department headquarters were probably as glad to see him gone as he was to go. He’d been General Custer’s right-hand man, after all, and Custer and the War Department had got along like rattlesnake and roadrunner—and who’d ended up eating whom was anybody’s guess.
He was on a train the next day, bound for Kentucky. He could have left Philadelphia even sooner if he’d wanted to take an airliner. He was content to stay on the ground. When he was a boy, there’d been no such things as airliners. When he was a boy, there’d been no such things as aeroplanes (or airplanes, as he saw the word spelled more and more often in newspapers and magazines). If one of them could carry two dozen people in reasonable comfort three or four times as fast as a train or a motorcar ran . . . That’s nice, Dowling thought. In an emergency, he would have flown. Without an emergency, no.
For one thing, trains boasted dining cars. Nothing he’d heard about food on airliners tempted him to sample it. The meals aboard the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Cincinnati Limited, on the other hand, fully measured up to Dowling’s exacting standards. He was sorry to have to leave the train and cross the Ohio into Kentucky.
It was late afternoon when a driver took him from Cincinnati over the bridges across the river and into Covington. A long line of northbound autos waited to cross the bridge. “What’s their trouble?” Dowling asked.
“They have to be searched, sir,” the driver answered. “You’re new here, aren’t you? We don’t want those Freedom Party bastards running guns and explosives up into the real United States.”
The real United States. Those four words spoke volumes. Dowling had ordered such precautions himself in Utah. He hadn’t thought they would be necessary here, but maybe he’d been naive. You’re new here, aren’t you? That spoke volumes, too. This game was being played for keeps.
No one fired at his motorcar on the way to the local Army encampment. No one fired, but he got plenty of hints he was in hostile country just the same. The graffiti shouted
FREEDOM! or CSA! They showed either a blue or a red St. Andrew’s cross: quick takes on the Confederate battle flag and the Freedom Party banner based on it.
In Utah, the occupation authorities would have cracked down on people who scribbled such things. In Utah, though, the occupation authorities had been the only formal power in the land. Here . . . Here there was also the state government—and that was in the hands of the Freedom Party. The Army faced an uphill fight it hadn’t had to worry about farther west.
“You want to hear something funny, sir?” the driver said as the green-gray Ford pulled up in front of BOQ.
“I,” Dowling answered most sincerely, “would love to hear something funny.”
“You know who our biggest backers here are?” the soldier asked.
“From everything I saw, I wondered if we had any backers here,” Dowling said.
“Oh, we do, sir. There’s one bunch of folks in this town—one bunch of folks in this whole goddamn state—who’d do anything in the world for us, anything at all. That’s the niggers. They don’t want one goddamn thing to do with the Confederate States, and can you blame ’em?”
“Not me,” Dowling admitted, but he couldn’t see how they’d help much, either.
A chilly, nasty rain fell on Augusta, Georgia. Scipio didn’t like the rain. He had to put on a long coat and rubber overshoes and to carry an umbrella to protect the tuxedo he had to wear at the Huntsman’s Lodge. Newsboys hawking their papers doubtless liked the rain even less. They got their copies of the Constitutionalist wrapped in yellow wax paper, but it didn’t always keep them dry. Customers who bought a newspaper with the consistency of bread soaked in milk were apt to say unkind things—and to demand a fresh copy without forking over another five cents.
“Election today!” the newsboys shouted from under their umbrellas. “President Featherston seeking second term!”
Scipio didn’t buy a paper. Why would he want a Constitutionalist when Jake Featherston was violating everything the Confederate Constitution had stood for since before the first shot was fired in the War of Secession? Oh, Featherston had rammed through the amendment that let him run again, but so what? Even a blind man could see that was a put-up job.
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