“Nah, this here is a different mix,” the exterminator told him. “It’s stronger than any of the stuff they used back then.”
“Bueno,”
Rodriguez said. “This means, maybe, the bugs don’t come back for a while once you kill them?”
“Maybe,” the man answered. By the way he hesitated before he said it, Rodriguez decided he meant
no.
Sure enough, he continued, “We get paid to kill all the little bastards that’re in there now. What happens after that . . . If you leave out ant syrup and spray Flit around and keep the place clean so you don’t draw roaches, you’ll do pretty good. And you can always call us out again.”
“Bueno,”
Rodriguez repeated, more sourly this time. Like undertakers, exterminators weren’t likely to go out of business anytime soon.
The engine came to noisy life. Whatever was in the gas cylinder started going into the tented barracks hall. Rodriguez got a tiny whiff of something that smelled sort of like mothballs but a hell of a lot stronger. That whiff was plenty to convince him he didn’t want to breathe any more of it. He moved away from the barracks in a hurry, and noticed the exterminators had already put some distance between themselves and their machinery.
“How soon can we go back in after y’all leave?” a guard asked one of the Buggone people.
“You folks did leave the windows and doors open so the place can air out?” the exterminator asked in return. The guard nodded. The exterminator said, “Well, in that case you oughta be safe goin’ in there tonight—say, after ten.”
Several guards swore. Rodriguez gave a mental shrug. Some things you just couldn’t help. What was the point of getting all excited about those?
“Wish we could fumigate the damn niggers like they was bugs,” a guard said.
Unfortunately for him, he said it where Tom Porter could hear him. The underofficer reamed him out for it: “Goddammit, Newcomb, watch your fool mouth. This here is a transit camp. It ain’t nothin’ else but a transit camp. You let the idea get out that it
is
somethin’ else and you turn the devil loose. Do you want that?
Do
you? Answer me when I talk to you, goddammit!”
“No, Troop Leader,” Newcomb said hastily.
“Then shut up, you hear me? Just shut up,” Porter said, and put his hands on his hips like an angry parent scolding a five-year-old. “You’ve all heard this shit before. To hell with me if I know what’s so hard about keeping your damnfool mouths shut, but y’all leak like a pail with a hole in it. We got to keep the niggers in camp tame, or we buy ourselves all kinds of shit. They go wild on us, we got to watch our backs every second like they did in the camps in Mississippi and Louisiana. Y’all want that?
Do
y’all?” Now he was yelling at every guard in earshot.
“No, Troop Leader,” they chorused, Rodriguez loud among them.
“All right, then,” the troop leader said, at least partly mollified. “Try and remember. You’re makin’ your own lives easier if you do.”
When Rodriguez patrolled the camp—either the men’s or the women’s half—he tried to watch his back every minute anyway. He didn’t know anybody who came from the Confederate Veterans’ Brigade who didn’t. Anybody who’d lived through the last war had seen for himself that not having eyes in the back of your head was a good way to end up dead in a hurry. Some of the younger fellows, the men who’d been Party stalwarts or guards but hadn’t actually known combat, were the ones who strolled through the compounds without a visible care in the world. Sooner or later, one of them would get knocked over the head. That might teach the others some sense. Rodriguez hoped it would, anyhow.
His shift was on the women’s side today. He would have gone up with the window shade if he’d accepted all the favors offered him. The women figured their lives could be easier if they had a guard on their side, and they knew what they had to give to get one. If he wanted favors like that, he could have them. When they got thrown in his face half a dozen times a day, he mostly didn’t want them.
“These nigger bitches is all whores,” opined his partner, an Alabaman named Alvin Sprinks.
“It could be,” Rodriguez said. He didn’t think it was, at least under most circumstances, but he didn’t feel like arguing. Life was too short.
A couple of guards with submachine guns at his back, Jefferson Pinkard prowled through the women’s camp. Rodriguez had seen how his wartime buddy made his own rounds in Camp Determination, going where he wanted to go when he wanted to go there. That was just an extension of the rule of watching your back all the time. To a man of Pinkard’s rank, the whole camp was his back.
“You think we get a lot of pussy thrown at us? Man, what about him?” Sprinks sounded jealous. Rodriguez only shrugged. If they tried to give you more than you wanted or could use, who cared how much more than that they tried to give you?
Pinkard spotted him, waved, and made a sudden left turn to head his way. The guards tramped along behind him like a couple of well-trained hounds. “How you doin’, Hip?” the camp commandant called.
“Not bad, sir. Thank you.” Rodriguez was always careful to show respect for his friend’s rank. Nobody’d called him
Hip
since the Great War ended; it was the sort of nickname only an English-speaker would use. From Pinkard, it didn’t bother him; it reminded him of the days when they’d been miserable side by side.
“Your barracks got fumigated this morning—ain’t that right?” Pinkard asked.
“Yes,
Señor
Jeff.” In spite of himself, Rodriguez was impressed by Pinkard’s grasp of detail. Nothing went on in Camp Determination that he didn’t know about, often before it happened.
“Bet you’ll be glad to get rid of the bugs,” Jeff said.
“Oh, yes, sir.” Rodriguez nodded. “But it is like anything else,
sí
?” He had the brains not to talk directly about the way the camp worked, not where
mallates
could overhear. “One batch goes away, but before long there is another.”
“Yeah, well, then we’ll call out those Buggone folks one more time and do it all over again. We’ll—” Pinkard broke off. He looked around the women’s half of Camp Determination. Then he looked back at Hipolito Rodriguez. “Son of a bitch,” he said softly. “
Son
of a bitch!”
“What is it?” Rodriguez asked.
“Don’t rightly know yet,” Jeff answered. “Might be nothin’. But it might be somethin’ big, too. You never can tell till you go and find out. If it is, I promise you I’ll get you what you deserve for it. Don’t want you to be like Chick Blades, who never did find out what he came up with.”
Rodriguez scratched his head. “What you mean,
Señor
Jeff?”
“Never mind. Don’t worry about it. It happened a long time ago, back in Louisiana.” Pinkard shook his head, as if at something he didn’t want to remember but couldn’t forget. He gathered himself. “You got to go on with your rounds, and so do I. See you later. Freedom!” Off he went, his guards in his wake.
“What the devil was that all about?” Alvin Sprinks asked.
“I don’t know,” Rodriguez said truthfully. “The commandant, he has an idea, I think.”
“Reckon so.” Despite agreeing, Sprinks sounded doubtful. The next idea he had would be his first. He could read and write—Rodriguez didn’t think there were any guards who couldn’t—but he didn’t like to.
“When we gonna git outa this place?” a gray-haired colored woman asked as the guards started through the camp again.
“Soon, Auntie, soon,” Rodriguez answered. Alvin Sprinks nodded solemnly. Rodriguez thought he would laugh or give the game away in some different fashion, but he didn’t. Maybe the troop leader had put the fear of God in him, at least for a while. He might not have his own ideas, but he could get them from someone else.
IX
W
aiting for the balloon to go up was the hardest thing a soldier did. Back in 1914, Tom Colleton had waited eagerly, even gaily, confident the war would be won and the damnyankees smashed before the cotton harvest came in. Everything would be glorious. Three years later, he was one of the lucky ones who came home again, glory quite forgotten.
The new war
had
smashed the USA, had split the country in two. That he was up here by Sandusky, Ohio, proved as much. Like Jake Featherston, like everyone else in the CSA, he’d assumed that splitting the United States meant winning the war. There was a lesson there, on what assumptions were worth, but he didn’t care to dwell on it.
“This time for sure,” he muttered.
“Sir?” asked an improbably young lieutenant commanding one of the companies in his regiment. He should have had a more experienced officer in that slot, but the replacement depot hadn’t coughed one up. Reinforcements were coming into Ohio, which was good. Even with them, though, not every hole got filled.
Tom wished the damnyankees had the same problem. He envied them their manpower pool. Confederate soldiers mostly had better weapons. He thought, and was far from alone in thinking, Confederate soldiers were better trained. Every one of them was worth more in combat than his U.S. counterpart. But Jesus God, there were a hell of a lot of Yankees!
He needed to answer the youngster. “This time for sure,” he repeated. “When we hit the U.S. forces this time, we’ve got to knock them out of the war. We’ve got to, and we damn well will.”
“Oh, yes, sir!” said the shavetail—Tom thought his name was Jackson. It was a safe bet, anyway; about one in every three Confederate soldiers seemed to be named Jackson. “Of course we will!”
He hadn’t been at the front very long. He could still think about—could still talk about—inevitable victory, the way Confederate wireless broadcasts did. Tom knew better. He thought the Confederates still had a good chance of doing what they wanted, but a good chance wasn’t a sure thing. Anyone who’d ever lost a hand with a flush knew all about that.
“We’ll see pretty soon,” he said.
Lieutenant—Jackson?—said, “How can we lose?”
Colleton put a hand on his shoulder. “I said the same damn thing when I came to the front at the start of the last war. I would have been a little older than you are now, I suppose, and then I spent all the time that came afterwards finding out how we could lose. I just hope like hell that doesn’t happen to you.”
“It won’t.” Jackson sounded supremely confident. “We got stabbed in the back last time. Niggers won’t have the chance to do that now. The Party’s going to take care of ’em, but good.”
He really believed that. To a certain extent, Tom did, too, but only to a certain extent. He said, “We would have had a better chance if they hadn’t risen up—sure. But there’s something you’ve got to remember, or you’ll go home in a box and never find out how the latest serial ends: the damnyankees can fight some, too.”
“Yes, sir.” Jackson’s tones were those of a well-brought-up young man too polite to correct an elder who’s said something obviously foolish. “But they’re just doing it on account of their government makes ’em.”
“Where did you hear that?” Tom asked, sending him a curious stare.
“In school. Everybody knows it.”
Is this what they’re teaching my children, too?
Tom wondered.
God help us if it is.
Gently, he asked, “Haven’t you ever noticed that not everything they teach you in school is true, and that a lot of things ‘everybody knows’ aren’t true at all?”
“No, sir, can’t say that I have,” Jackson answered after serious, earnest, and very visible consideration.
He meant that, too. For the first time, Tom found himself frightened for the younger generation in the CSA. If this was what they learned . . . “Lieutenant, there’s something you have to understand, because it’s the Lord’s truth. The Yankees don’t like us any better than we like them. They don’t need the government to make them fight. They’d do it anyhow, on account of we jumped them. Next time we interrogate some prisoners, you listen in. You’ll see.”
“I’ll do that,” Jackson said. “But they’ll just spout the nonsense their higher-ups told them. They’re—what’s the word? They’re indoctrinated, that’s it.” He looked pleased with himself for remembering.
And you’re not?
Tom wondered. He couldn’t ask, though. Jackson might see other people’s indoctrination. His own was to him like the air under its wings to a butterfly. He didn’t think about it. He didn’t notice it. He just floated on it and let it support him.
Not far behind them, artillery rumbled. Things were starting to pick up. The Confederate gunners fired barrages to east and west, to keep the U.S. soldiers posted in front of them from guessing which way they would move when the time came. Tom wished the men in green-gray didn’t know the time was coming.
Wish for a million dollars while you’re at it,
he thought. The Yankees weren’t blind men. The Confederate buildup had been as subtle as the soldiers with wreathed stars on their collars could make it, but you couldn’t hide everything no matter how hard you tried.
The Confederates were doing their best. As Tom walked up toward the front, he passed barrels—both the older model and the new—crouching under camouflage netting with leaves and sod applied to make them as nearly invisible as possible. They’d moved up under cover of darkness; the orders against moving by daylight were explicit to the point of bloodthirstiness. More C.S. artillery fire had masked the sound of their advance. The damnyankees had used that trick in the last war. Imitation was the sincerest form of flattery. With luck, it would be the best revenge, too.
“Get low, you damn fool, before somebody shoots you!” The raucous advice came from a foxhole by the side of the path. Only the two stars on each side of Tom’s collar that marked his rank showed he was an officer. He’d deliberately dulled them, so the Yankees’ snipers wouldn’t single him out. Evidently his own men couldn’t single him out, either.
And getting low was good advice almost any time. Tom hit the dirt and crawled toward the foxhole. U.S. artillery started coming in before he got there. The crawl turned into an undignified scramble.
“Jesus!” The private already in it sounded disgusted. “This fucker ain’t big enough for two.” Then he noticed Tom’s rank badges. “Uh, sir.”
He wasn’t wrong, even if he was rude. Tom took his entrenching tool off his belt and started digging like a mole after forty cups of coffee. “Just have to make it bigger,” he said. He added the dirt from his excavation to the breastwork in front of the hole.
“Huh,” the soldier said in surprise. “Didn’t know officers knew how to handle one o’ them things.”
“If I didn’t, I would have got killed when I was your age,” Tom answered, glad to pause and pant. “Ever hear of the Roanoke front?”
“Sure as hell did. Uncle Lucas came back without most of his arm on account of he was there.” The soldier paused, taking longer than he should have to make the connection. “You was there, too?”
“That’s right. I’m sorry about your uncle. I never got more than a few scratches myself—I was lucky.”
“Better believe you was.” The private might have said more, but the scream of an incoming shell warned it would come down somewhere close. He and Tom both ducked. The explosion was close enough to make the ground shake. Fragments maliciously whined and screeched overhead. A few clods of dirt pattered down into the hole, but nothing worse.
On the Roanoke front, that one shell would have been the harbinger of many more, and only extraordinary luck and a hole better than this one would have kept a man from getting maimed or killed. Things were quieter here. The damnyankees had shifted a lot of their weight to Virginia. What was left was good enough to hold the Confederates in place and harass them, but not to work the wholesale slaughter that had been so common in the Great War.
The United States didn’t seem to have figured out that the Confederate States were shifting men out of Virginia and sliding them back over here. Nothing made Tom happier than their continued ignorance. The more the Yankees fussed and fumed in the East, the less attention they’d pay to anything out here. If they stayed ignorant till morning after next . . .
They did. The real Confederate barrage started an hour before sunrise. It was thunderous enough to wake Tom. After all the gunfire he’d slept through at the front in two wars—and in fighting the Negroes after the first one—that was no mean feat. Freight-train noises traveled the rails of the sky from west to east.
Yankee counterbattery fire started almost at once. The U.S. soldiers weren’t fools. He’d said as much to Lieutenant Jackson. (Absently, he wondered whether Jackson still lived. He thought so, but he hadn’t had any reports from that company for most of a day.) They knew trouble when they walked into it. One after another, though, their guns fell silent, battered into submission by a heavier weight of metal.
The Confederate barrage let up precisely at sunrise. Its purpose was to stun, not to kill everything on the U.S. side of the line. Three years of bloody experience had taught the CSA and the USA that they couldn’t kill all their enemies, or even enough of them, with big guns alone. And a really heavy artillery preparation, one that went on for days, ruined the ground over which attackers would advance and slowed them down. Less gunnery amounted to more.
Confederate barrels rumbled and rattled and clanked forward. Tom scrambled up out of his hole. He had an officer’s brass whistle, and blew a long, shrill blast on it. “Come on, you lazy sons of bitches!” he yelled. “We’ve caught ’em by surprise, and now we’ll make ’em pay. Watch your buddies and follow me!”
An officer who told his men to follow him could almost always get them to obey. An officer who told troops to advance but sat tight himself had a lot more trouble. The only thing wrong with officers of the first sort was that they got shot a lot more often than the others.
If you thought about things like that . . . Tom resolutely didn’t. If everybody thought about things like that instead of being afraid to act like a coward in front of his buddies or his men, war would become impossible. The machine-gun fire in front of him said this war remained altogether too possible. Not all the damnyankees were stunned—far from it.
Asskickers screamed down out of the sky to bomb strongpoints the C.S. artillery hadn’t silenced. For the moment, the dive bombers—and the Confederates—had it all their own way. Dazed U.S. soldiers threw up their hands and hoped the advancing men in butternut would let them surrender instead of just shooting them and moving on.
Just like last year,
Tom thought, and wondered if that was good or bad.
W
hen Brigadier General Irving Morrell’s train pulled into the Broad Street Station in Philadelphia, he couldn’t have been in a worse mood if he’d tried for a week. The endless delays on the trip north from Virginia did nothing to improve his temper. Between bomb damage and rail sabotage, the trip took three times as long as it should have. All he missed was getting the train strafed from the air. But he could have flown up in the Army’s fastest fighter and still arrived ready to bite nails in half.
Colonel John Abell met him at the station. That didn’t make him any happier, even if the colorless General Staff officer was the one who’d let him know he’d finally earned stars on his shoulder straps.
“Goddammit, Colonel, I’m not a Ping-Pong ball, you know!” Morrell exploded. He almost said,
God damn you, Colonel.
He suspected Abell was responsible for getting him pulled out of Virginia, and he intended to raise Cain about it.
For the moment, Abell was imperturbable. “Consider it a compliment, sir,” he answered, his voice—an unmemorable baritone—never rising. “We always try to send you where the country needs you most.”
That took some of the wind out of Morrell’s sails, but only some. “I’m not a fire brigade all by myself,” he pointed out. “Where are my fire engines? Where are my firemen? Where’s my . . . hook and ladder?” At the last possible instant, he left off the participle.
“Come with me, sir,” Abell said, still mildly. “We’ll give you our estimate of the situation in Ohio, and then we’ll send you West to—”
“Make bricks without straw,” Morrell broke in. The General Staff officer looked pained. How he looked wasn’t a patch on how Morrell felt. “I’ve already tried that in Ohio, thank you very much. Are you going to see if history can repeat itself? And are you setting me up to take the fall if it does? It can’t be
your
fault, after all.”
By
you
he didn’t mean Abell’s alone, but all the officers in Philadelphia who thought of war as theory and maps and not as cordite and burning barrels and mangled men. They were good at what they did. Because they were, they thought they knew everything there was to know about the business of organized slaughter. Morrell had a different, and lower, opinion.
“We’re both on the same side, sir,” Abell said. “We’ve flushed out several traitors—some of them planted long, long ago—and more no doubt remain in place. But no one has ever questioned your loyalty or patriotism.”
“That’s white of you, by God,” Morrell said.
“Making things as difficult as possible is another story,” Abell snapped, his iron control rusting a little at last. “Will you come with me to the War Department, please? We can’t hash things out here on the platform.”
“I’ll come,” Morrell replied, and he did.
He and Abell had little to say to each other on the short ride through central Philadelphia. The de facto capital looked more battered every time Morrell saw it. The War Department had taken several hits since the last time he was there. Abell remarked, “Much of what we do these days is underground. We dig like moles.”
“You’ve had your heads in the ground for a long time,” Morrell observed, and bright patches of red burned on Abell’s sallow cheeks. Morrell went on, “Tell me about the new Confederate barrels. How long will we have to wait before we’ve got anything like that?”