Settling Accounts_ Drive To The East Part 18

"Let's get him," Sam said. "Tell me when, and I'll pa.s.s it on to the guys who toss ash cans."

"Will do, Skipper." Bevacqua waited maybe fifteen seconds, then said, "Now!"

"Launch depth charges!" Sam shouted through the PA system-no need to keep quiet anymore.

During the Great War, ash cans had rolled off over the stern. The state of the art was better now. Two projectors flung depth charges well ahead of the ship. The charges arced through the air and splashed into the ocean.

"All engines reverse!" Cooley said. Sam nodded. Depth charges bursting in shallow water could blow the bow off the ship that had launched them. Carsten recalled the pathetic signal he'd heard about from a destroyer escort that had had that misfortune befall her: I HAVE BUSTED MYSELF I HAVE BUSTED MYSELF. If it happened to him, he'd he'd be busted, too, probably all the way to seaman second cla.s.s. be busted, too, probably all the way to seaman second cla.s.s.

Even though the Josephus Daniels Josephus Daniels had backed engines, the ash cans did their d.a.m.nedest to lift her out of the water. Sam felt as if somebody'd whacked him on the soles of his feet with a board. Water rose and then splashed back into the sea. More bursts roiled the Atlantic. had backed engines, the ash cans did their d.a.m.nedest to lift her out of the water. Sam felt as if somebody'd whacked him on the soles of his feet with a board. Water rose and then splashed back into the sea. More bursts roiled the Atlantic.

Somebody at the bow whooped: "She's coming up!"

"Searchlights!" Sam barked, and the night lit up. He knew the chance he was taking. If C.S. planes spotted him before he settled the sub, he was in a world of trouble. Have to settle it quick, then, Have to settle it quick, then, he thought. he thought.

Men spilled out of the damaged submersible's conning tower and ran for the cannon on the deck. It was only a three-inch gun, but Carsten's destroyer escort wasn't exactly a battlewagon. If that gun hit, it could hurt.

"Let 'em have it!" Sam yelled. The forward gun spoke in a voice like an angry G.o.d's. The antiaircraft cannon at the bow started barking, too. They were more than good enough to tear up an unarmored target like a sub. The enemy got off one shot, which went wild. Then men on that deck started dropping as if a harvester were rumbling down it.

"White flag!" Three people shouted the same thing at the same time.

"Cease fire!" Sam yelled through the intercom, and then, "If they make a move toward that gun, blow 'em all to h.e.l.l!" He turned away from the mike and spoke to Cooley: "Approach and take survivors."

"Aye aye, sir," the exec said. He had a different worry: "I hope to h.e.l.l she's not one of our boats."

"Gurk!" Sam said. That hadn't even crossed his mind. It wasn't impossible in these waters, one more thing he knew too well. They wouldn't just bust him for that. They'd boot him out of the Navy.

As the Josephus Daniels Josephus Daniels drew closer, he breathed again. The shape of the conning tower and the lines of the hull were different from those of U.S. boats. And the sailors tumbling into life rafts wore dark gray tunics and trousers. They were Confederates, all right. drew closer, he breathed again. The shape of the conning tower and the lines of the hull were different from those of U.S. boats. And the sailors tumbling into life rafts wore dark gray tunics and trousers. They were Confederates, all right.

A last couple of men popped out of the hatch atop the conning tower. The submersible startled rapidly settling down into the sea. They opened the scuttling c.o.c.ks, They opened the scuttling c.o.c.ks, Sam realized. He swore, but halfheartedly. In their place, he would have done the same thing. Sam realized. He swore, but halfheartedly. In their place, he would have done the same thing.

"Watching them will be fun," Cooley said. "We haven't got a brig. Even if we did, it wouldn't hold that many."

"We'll keep them up on deck, where the machine guns will bear," Sam answered. "I don't see how we can make our cruise with them along, though. I'll wireless for instructions."

As soon as the prisoners were aboard, he doused the searchlight. The pharmacist's mate did what he could for the wounded. Sam went down to the deck and called for the enemy skipper. "Here I am, sir," a glum-sounding man said. "Lieutenant Reed Talcott, at your service. I don't thank you for wrecking us, but I do for picking us up." He tipped a greasy cap he'd somehow kept on his head.

"Part of the game, Lieutenant," Sam said, and gave his own name. "If it makes you feel any better, I've been sunk, too."

"Not one d.a.m.n bit," Talcott said promptly.

Sam laughed. "All right. Can't say as I blame you. We'll put you somewhere out of the way, and then we'll get on with the war."

Not for the first time, Clarence Potter thought that Richmond and Philadelphia were both too close to the C.S.U.S. border for comfort. When war came between the two countries-and it came, and came, and came-the capitals were appallingly vulnerable. They got more so as time went by, too: each side developed new and better-or was worse the right word?-ways to punish the other. For all practical purposes, the d.a.m.nyankees had abandoned Washington as an administrative center. It just made too handy a target.

At the moment, though, Washington wasn't the first thing on Potter's mind. He stood behind a sawhorse in Capitol Square, one of at least a dozen that had red rope strung from them to form a perimeter. Signs hung from the rope: WARNING! UNEXPLODED BOMB! WARNING! UNEXPLODED BOMB! If that wasn't enough to get the message across, the signs also displayed the skull and crossbones. If that wasn't enough to get the message across, the signs also displayed the skull and crossbones.

Even so, a woman started to duck under the ropes to take a shortcut to the Capitol. "Get the h.e.l.l out of there, lady!" a sergeant shouted at her. "You want to get your stupid a.s.s blown off?"

"Well!" she sniffed. "Such language!"

The sergeant sighed and turned to Potter. "It ain't like she hasn't got enough a.s.s so she couldn't use some of it blown off," he said. The Intelligence officer chuckled; indeed, the woman hadn't missed any meals. The noncom, a member of the Bomb Disposal Unit, went on, "Jesus G.o.d, sir, you wouldn't reckon people could be so stinking stupid, though, would you?"

"Oh, I don't know," Potter said. "That kind of thing rarely surprises me. A lot of people are are d.a.m.n fools, and there's not much you can do about it, except maybe try to keep them from killing themselves." d.a.m.n fools, and there's not much you can do about it, except maybe try to keep them from killing themselves."

"Ugly b.i.t.c.h wouldn't have been that much of a loss." The sergeant sighed again. "Still and all, I expect you're right. I just wish the Yankees were d.a.m.n fools."

Potter pointed toward the hole in the ground where the sergeant's colleagues were working. "If they made better ordnance, that would have gone off," he said, though he knew Confederate munitions factories turned out their fair share of duds, too.

But the sergeant shook his head. "It ain't necessarily so, sir. Some of these f.u.c.kers-uh, excuse me-"

"I've heard the word before," Potter said dryly. "I've even used the word before."

"Oh." The sergeant eyed the wreathed stars on either side of his collar. "I guess maybe. Anyways, though, like I was saying, some of 'em have time fuses, so they go boom when people aren't expecting 'em. You'll have heard about that, won't you?"

"I sure have," Potter said. "So you have to get them out of there before they go off. I'd be lying if I said I envied you."

"Sometimes we get 'em out. Sometimes we have to defuse 'em where they're at," the BDU sergeant said. "And that's what I meant when I said I wished the d.a.m.nyankees were fools. Some of their time fuses're just time fuses. Then we race the clock, like. Some of 'em, though, some of 'em are b.o.o.by-trapped, so they'll go off when we start messing with the time fuse. They'll put those on ordinary bombs, too, so they'll explode if you tinker. Sons of b.i.t.c.hes want to kill us us off, see, so then more of their time bombs'll work." off, see, so then more of their time bombs'll work."

"That's . . . unpleasant," Potter said. "How do you handle those?"

"Carefully," the sergeant answered.

Potter laughed, not that the younger man was kidding. Here was a glimpse of a cat-and-mouse game he hadn't imagined before. Of course the Yankees wanted to blow up the people who got rid of unexploded bombs. It made perfect military sense-but it was hard on the men of the BDU. He asked, "Do we do the same thing to them?"

"Beats me, sir," the noncom said, "but if we don't, we're missing a h.e.l.l of a chance."

"All right. That's fair enough-no reason to expect you to know," Potter said. He could find out for himself-or maybe he couldn't, depending on how tight security was. Discovering the answer to that might be interesting all by itself.

"Hey, Cochrane!" somebody bawled from the direction of the hole in the ground. "Give me a hand setting up the clockstopper. We're going to need it on this son of a b.i.t.c.h."

"The clockstopper?" Potter said, intrigued.

"Sir, I can't talk about that," the sergeant-presumably Cochrane-said. "Security-you know how it is. And now, if you'll excuse me . . ." He sketched a salute and hurried away.

No bomb burst shattered the calm of Richmond in the next half hour, so Potter supposed the clockstopper and whatever other arcane tools the Bomb Disposal Unit brought to bear on the bomb did what they were supposed to do. The war sp.a.w.ned every kind of specialist, not all of whom operated with as many eyes upon them as did the men of the BDU.

After Potter went back to the War Department, he remarked on what he'd seen to Nathan Bedford Forrest III. He couldn't very well breach security with the head of the General Staff; if Forrest didn't have the right to know everything there was to know, n.o.body in the CSA did. (Given the way things were in the Confederacy these days, quite possibly no one but Jake Featherston did. Potter preferred not to dwell on that.) As things turned out, he didn't have to dwell on it, because General Forrest knew enough to satisfy his curiosity. Nodding, Forrest said, "The BDU men are some of the best we have. Every one of them is a volunteer, too."

Potter couldn't look out on Richmond from Forrest's office, which had plywood in place of window gla.s.s. Before long, window gla.s.s here in the capital might grow as extinct as the pa.s.senger pigeon. Of course, the same was no doubt just as true in Philadelphia. After pausing to light a cigarette, the Intelligence officer said, "I hadn't thought about it, but I'm not surprised. You wouldn't want somebody who didn't want to be there messing with those bombs."

"That's what everybody thinks," Forrest agreed. "Let me steal one of those from you." Potter gave him a smoke. He tapped it on his desk a couple of times to settle the tobacco, then stuck it in his mouth. Potter lit a match for him and held it out. "Thanks," Forrest said. He took a drag, blew out a plume of smoke, and looked up at the ceiling. "A lot of men volunteer for the duty."

"Good," Potter said. "I'd worry if they didn't."

"Yes, yes." Forrest sounded impatient. "When you put it that way, so would I. But do you know how long the average service career of a BDU man is?"

"No, sir," Potter admitted. "I don't have the faintest idea."

"Two and a half months-I saw the number just the other day, so it's fresh in my mind," Forrest said. "We need need a lot of volunteers. By the way, we don't talk about that number to BDU personnel, not under any circ.u.mstances." a lot of volunteers. By the way, we don't talk about that number to BDU personnel, not under any circ.u.mstances."

"I believe it." Potter also believed that BDU men could probably figure it out for themselves, or at least come close. They all had to be mourning friends and comrades. Two and a half months . . . That was worse than he would have guessed. "Nos morituri te salutamus," "Nos morituri te salutamus," he murmured. he murmured.

Nathan Bedford Forrest III nodded. "The only good thing you can say about the business is that, if something goes wrong, it's all over before the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds know it. The bombs go off faster than the nervous system can react."

"That does matter," Potter said. He hadn't been at the front in the last war, but he'd been close enough to have seen horrors aplenty. Dreadfully wounded men, as far as he was concerned, were worse horrors than the dead. No matter how gruesome a corpse was, it was beyond suffering. For the living, pain went on and on.

The telephone rang. "Forrest here," Forrest said. Potter left. He didn't wait for Forrest to wave him out because he lacked clearance to hear whatever the chief of the General Staff was talking about. Disappearing without being asked in such circ.u.mstances was part of the etiquette of the security-conscious.

Potter's own above-ground office, to which he'd defiantly returned, also had plywood in place of gla.s.s. Gla.s.s, these days, was not only a luxury but a dangerous luxury. In a bomb burst, shards were so many flying knives. They could chop a man into hamburger in the blink of an eye. Potter knew that. He missed being able to see out even so.

One thing-since he couldn't look out the window, he couldn't use looking out the window as an excuse for daydreaming. He had to buckle down and tackle the work on his desk. And so, reluctantly, he did.

On top of the pile was an urgent request from the Mormons of Deseret for whatever the Confederacy could send them. Getting supplies to them was harder than it had been when the rebellion first broke out. The U.S. noose was tightening. Potter had known it would. In a way, encouraging and helping the Mormon uprising seemed dreadfully unfair. Those people had not a chance in the world of winning, but they were eager to try, eager to the point of madness. It was enough to make a man with a conscience feel guilty.

Of course, a man with that kind of conscience had no business getting into Intelligence in the first place. Potter knew as much. He also knew his d.a.m.nyankee counterparts were doing everything they could to arm the Negro terrorists in the CSA. If turnabout wasn't fair play, what was? The only thing he really felt bad about was that there were so many more Negroes in the Confederate States than Mormons in the United States. Blacks caused more trouble for his side than the religious maniacs did for the enemy.

He wondered whether some Confederate operative had suggested auto bombs to the Mormons or they'd come up with them on their own. Either way, they made a viciously effective weapon for the weak against the strong. Again, Negroes in the CSA had proved that-and continued to prove it whenever they got the chance.

We need to keep this uprising alive as long as we can, he wrote. he wrote. Where else can we tie down so many U.S. soldiers at so little cost to ourselves? Where else can we tie down so many U.S. soldiers at so little cost to ourselves?

Even though the question was rhetorical as he wrote it, he knew it did have a possible answer. If Canada flared into rebellion, the Yankees would need endless divisions to hold it down. But, despite a.s.siduous efforts, the Confederates hadn't made a lot of friends up there. To Canadians, they might as well have been Yankees themselves. That infuriated Clarence Potter-and every other Confederate who'd ever run into the problem-but fury didn't do much good.

If any outsiders could make the Canadians rise up, the Confederates weren't the ones. The British were. Potter paused thoughtfully. Winston Churchill was supposed to favor quixotic schemes like that-and keeping the USA busy was as much in Britain's interest as it was in the CSA's.

A memorandum from Potter would never reach the British Prime Minister. A memorandum from Jake Featherston, on the other hand . . . Potter nodded to himself. Churchill might not agree. That was the chance you took. But he wouldn't be able to ignore the request from an allied head of state. And Featherston would look at a memorandum from Potter. The Intelligence officer paused for a moment to gather his thoughts, then began to write.

Jake Featherston often felt busier than a one-legged man in an a.s.s-kicking contest. He sometimes thought he wouldn't have wanted to become President if he'd known ahead of time how much work the job was. That wasn't true-down deep in his heart, he knew as much-but it gave him something to complain about.

Take paperwork. He'd never known what an obscene word that could be till he came to the Gray House. No matter how much he gave to other people, he still had plenty and then some. Paperwork was the price he paid for being boss.

Every once in a while, he ran into something he really needed to see. When he came to a memorandum from Clarence Potter, he knew he had to read it. For one thing, Potter would give him a hard time if he didn't. And, for another, even though he trusted the Intelligence officer about as far as he could throw him, Potter had a lefthanded way of looking at the world that was often valuable. By his own lights, Potter was a patriot. Where his lights and Jake's corresponded, they got on fine.

As Featherston read through this scheme, he found himself nodding. "Yeah," he said when he was done. "About time we got some help from our so-called allies." He knew as well as anybody that Britain was heavily bogged down in western Germany, trying to hold on to the gains she and France had made when the war was shiny and new. He recognized the feeling. He had it himself. The problem with grabbing a tiger by the tail was that letting go could hurt even worse than hanging on.

He picked up a pen and started to write. If Churchill wanted to play along, this wouldn't cost the limeys much-and if it went off well, it could bring the United States untold grief. That wouldn't break Jake's heart. Oh, no-far from it.

His big worry was that Churchill was too obsessed with the Kaiser to care what happened on this side of the Atlantic. But the USA was the country that had taken Canada and Newfoundland away from England after the Great War. Winston was almost as good at remembering offenses done him as Jake was himself.

"Lulu!" he called from his office.

"What is it, Mr. President?" his secretary asked.

"I want Major Hamilton right away."

Major Ira Hamilton hurried into the President's underground office inside of five minutes. "Reporting as ordered, sir," he said. He was tall, thin, and bespectacled; he looked much more like a math teacher than a major.

"Good. Good." Jake thrust the paper at him. "I need you to put this into our fanciest code and send it to London just as fast as you can." There was a reason Hamilton looked like a math teacher: up till the war started, he'd been a professor of mathematics at Washington University.

"I'll do it, sir," he said. "It doesn't look too long-it should go out this afternoon."

"That'll be just fine, Major. Thank you kindly." Featherston was far more polite with people who were useful to him than with the rest of the world. Hamilton gave him a ragged salute and hurried away. Someone would keep a discreet eye on the unmilitary major to make sure he did what he was supposed to do and nothing else. And someone would watch the man who watched Hamilton, and somebody would. . . .

Things had to work that way. If you didn't keep an eye on people, they'd make you wish you had. Jake even kept an eye on Don Partridge. He'd chosen his Vice President because Partridge was the mildest, safest, most inoffensive, and most useless man he could find-and he kept an eye on him anyway. You couldn't be too careful.

Some of the papers Featherston plowed through were damage reports from the western part of the Confederacy. The d.a.m.nyankees were trying to knock out the dams he'd built on the Tennessee and the c.u.mberland Rivers. That infuriated him. It alarmed him, too. The Confederate States needed the electricity those dams produced. It kept factories going. And it changed millions of people's lives. He was as proud of those dams and what they did as of almost anything else his administration had accomplished.

Almost was the key word there. Ferd Koenig came in a couple of hours later. "Good to see you, by G.o.d," Jake said. "Have a seat." He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of fine Tennessee sipping whiskey. "Have a snort." was the key word there. Ferd Koenig came in a couple of hours later. "Good to see you, by G.o.d," Jake said. "Have a seat." He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of fine Tennessee sipping whiskey. "Have a snort."

"Don't mind if I do." Koenig took the bottle from him, raised it, swallowed, and pa.s.sed it back. "Virgin's milk. The corn that went in there died happy."

"You better believe it." Jake swigged, too. Velvet fire ran down his throat. He set the bottle on the desk after one knock. He wanted the taste. He didn't want to get smashed. "So how's relocation coming?"

"Tolerable. Better than tolerable, matter of fact," Koenig answered. "One neighborhood at a time, one town at a time, we clean 'em out. Off they go. They reckon they're going to camps, and they are. What they don't reckon on is, they don't come out again."

"Towns are all very well. Towns are better than all very well, matter of fact," Jake said. "But there's still the core of the cotton country-from South Carolina through Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi into Louisiana. We thinned that out some when we brought in harvesters-got a bunch of n.i.g.g.e.rs off the farms and into towns where we could deal with 'em easier."

"Got a bunch of 'em with rifles in their hands, too," Ferdinand Koenig said dryly. "They didn't have work anymore, so they reckoned they might as well go out and start shooting white folks."

He wasn't wrong, but Featherston said, "We had trouble with 'em before that, too," which was also true. He went on, "That whole G.o.dd.a.m.n Black Belt's been up in arms ever since the Great War. d.a.m.n Whigs never were able to put it down all the way, and we've had our own fun and games with it. Plenty of places down there where it's never been safe for a white man to go around by himself in broad daylight, let alone after the sun goes down."

"That's only part of the problem," Koenig said. "In towns, you can put barbed wire around the n.i.g.g.e.r district, and after that you can go in and clean it out one chunk at a time, however you want to. The n.i.g.g.e.rs in the countryside, you can't cordon 'em off so easy. They just slip away. It's like trying to scoop up water with a sieve."

"Gotta keep working on it," Jake said.

The Attorney General's jowls wobbled as he nodded. "Oh, h.e.l.l, I know that," he said. "But the real trouble is, it takes a lot of manpower, and we haven't got a lot of people to spare, not the way things are going."

"I know, I know." Featherston reached for the whiskey bottle again. More heat trickled down his throat. He'd been so certain he could knock the USA out of the war in a hurry. He'd been so certain-and he'd been so wrong. Soldiers at the front were more important than anything else, even people to help round up the n.i.g.g.e.rs. After yet another swig, he added, "Those trucks that Pinkard came up with can't handle all the volume we need for this operation, either."

"They're the best we've got," Koenig said. "And we don't have guards eating their guns all the G.o.dd.a.m.n time anymore, either, the way we did before we started using them."

"I know that, too, dammit," Jake said impatiently. "We need something better, though-and no, I don't know what it is any more than you do. But something. We've got to get rid of those n.i.g.g.e.rs in great big old lots."

"You can figure out d.a.m.n near anything if you throw enough money and enough smart people at it," Ferd Koenig observed. "Is this worth throwing 'em at it? Or do we need the people and the money more somewhere else?"

"This is what we spent all that time wandering in the wilderness for," Jake said, as if he were Moses leading the CSA to the Promised Land. That was exactly how he felt, too. "If we don't do this, we're letting the country down."

"Well, all right." Koenig nodded again. "I feel the same way, but I needed to make sure you did. We can do that-you know we can. But it'll likely mean pulling those people and that money away from the war effort."

"This is is the war effort," Jake Featherston declared. "What else would you call it? the war effort," Jake Featherston declared. "What else would you call it? This This is what counts." Even as he spoke, he heard the rumble of U.S. artillery fire, not nearly far enough to the north. He nodded anyway. "We clean out the c.o.o.ns, we'll do something for this country that'll last till the end of time." is what counts." Even as he spoke, he heard the rumble of U.S. artillery fire, not nearly far enough to the north. He nodded anyway. "We clean out the c.o.o.ns, we'll do something for this country that'll last till the end of time."

"All right, then. We'll tend to it." Koenig sighed. "I wish we had as many people as the Yankees do. They can afford to keep more b.a.l.l.s in the air at the same time than we can."

"I don't care about their b.a.l.l.s in the air. Those aren't the ones I aim to kick," Jake said.