The Grapple (12 page)

“So let’s see,” George said. “Japan’s at war with us, and England’s at war with us, but away from all that they’re at war with each other? You ask me, they’re trying to set a world record.”

“Better them than us,” Dalby said. “Only way England’s stayed in the Far East as long as she has is that Japan’s let her. If Japan doesn’t want her around any more…Well, she may hang on to India—”

“Her goose is really cooked if she doesn’t,” George said.

“Yeah. That’s why she’s got to try, I expect,” the gun chief said. “But Japan’s already in Indochina. She’s already in the East Indies. Siam’s on her side, not England’s. What with all that, no way in hell the limeys keep her out of Malaya.”

“Japan has all that stuff, she’ll be really nasty twenty, thirty years down the line,” Fritz Gustafson said.

“Let’s worry about winning this one first,” George said, and neither of the other men chose to disagree with him.

E
ven though Jefferson Pinkard had run Camp Determination since the day it started going up on the west Texas prairie, he got his news on the wireless just like everybody else in the CSA. “In heavy defensive fighting just southeast of Lubbock, Confederate troops inflicted heavy losses on the Yankee invaders,” the announcer said.

That same bulletin probably went out all over the Confederate States. If you didn’t have a map handy and you didn’t bother working out what lay behind what actually got said, it sounded pretty good. Like a lot of people, though, Jeff knew what lay behind it, and he didn’t need a map to know where Lubbock was.
Defensive fighting
meant the Confederates were retreating.
Just southeast of Lubbock
meant the town had fallen.
Heavy losses on the Yankee invaders
meant…nothing, probably. And Lubbock was just up the road from Snyder—and from the camp.

Just up the road,
in Texas, meant about eighty miles. Soldiers in green-gray wouldn’t be here day after tomorrow. Jefferson Pinkard and Camp Determination were ready if the damnyankees did come close. The trucks that asphyxiated Negroes would drive away. The bathhouses that gassed them would go up in explosions that ought to leave no sign of what the buildings were for. The paperwork that touched on killings would burn. Nothing would be left except an enormous concentration camp….

And mass graves. Jeff didn’t know what to do about those. He didn’t think he could do much of anything. Oh, bulldozers could cover over all of the trenches, but nothing could dispose of all the bodies and bones.

He got to his feet and stared out at the camp from the window in his office. He looked like what he was: a middle-aged man who’d been a steelworker when he was younger. Yes, his belly hung over his trousers and he had a double chin. But he also had broad shoulders and a hard core of muscle under the weight he’d put on as the years went by.

And he had the straightforward stubbornness of a man who’d worked with his hands and expected problems to go away if you put some extra muscle into them. Not all of a camp administrator’s problems disappeared so conveniently. He knew that; he’d gained guile as well as weight over the years. Still, his first impulse was to try to smash whatever got in his way.

He couldn’t smash the damnyankees single-handed. He’d fought in west Texas during the Great War as a private soldier. Even now, he had no particular clout with local Army officers. His Freedom Party rank—group leader—was the equivalent of major general, but he had no authority over Army troops.

No direct authority, anyhow. He did have friends, or at least associates, in high places. When he got on the phone to Richmond, he didn’t call the War Department. He called the Attorney General’s office. He didn’t love Ferdinand Koenig, who kept piling responsibility onto his back as if he were a mule. Here, though, the two of them were traveling the same road. Pinkard hoped they were, anyhow.

“What can I do for you today?” Koenig asked when the connection went through. He assumed Pinkard wanted him to do something. And he was right.

“Any chance you can get more soldiers on this front, sir?” Pinkard asked. “If Lubbock’s gone, we got us some real trouble.”

“Well, now, you know that isn’t my proper place,” Koenig said cautiously. “I can’t come out and tell the Army what to do.”

“Yes, sir. I know that. I damn well ought to. Damn soldiers won’t listen to me, neither.” Jeff spoke with the resentment of a man who’d tried to get them to move but couldn’t. “But does the President want the damnyankees to take Camp Determination away from us?”

“You know he doesn’t.” Now Koenig spoke without hesitation.

“Well, I sure
hope
he doesn’t, anyway. But if he doesn’t, we better have the men out here to keep the USA from doing it,” Jeff said.

“We’ve got trouble other places, too,” the Attorney General reminded him.

“Oh, yes, sir. You don’t need to tell me that,” Jeff said. “But we got trouble here, too, and we’re out in the back of fucking beyond—pardon my French—so who ever hears about it? Yankee general hasn’t got much more than a scratch force himself. Some more men, some more airplanes, some more barrels, we can run him right back over the border.”

“I can’t promise you anything,” Ferdinand Koenig said. “I’ll talk to the President, and that’s as much as I can tell you.”

“Thank you kindly, sir. That’s all I wanted,” Jeff lied. He wanted a couple of divisions rolling through Snyder on their way to driving the damnyankees back from Lubbock. He thought Camp Determination deserved to be protected. “Wouldn’t want the United States going on about this place if they grabbed it.”

“No, we don’t want that,” Koenig agreed. “I’ll see what I can do, and that’s all I can say.”

“All right.” Jeff knew he wouldn’t get anything more. He tried to make sure he did get something: “Doesn’t even have to be regular Confederate soldiers. Most of what we need out here is bodies, so the damnyankees can’t just go around us. Mexicans would do the trick, or Freedom Party guards.”

“Won’t be Mexicans,” Koenig said. “The Emperor doesn’t want ’em going into combat against the USA, not any more. Only way the President talked him into giving us more was by swearing on a stack of Bibles he wouldn’t use ’em for anything but internal security. Freedom Party guards, though…” He paused thoughtfully.

Pinkard was a fisherman from way back when. He knew he had a nibble. Trying to set the hook, he said, “This might be a good place to let the guards show what they can do. If they fight harder than soldiers…” He paused, too. The Freedom Party guards were Ferd Koenig’s own personal, private bailiwick. If they fought better than soldiers, or at least as well, then Koenig had his own personal, private army. He might not mind that. No, he might not mind that at all.

He was nobody’s fool, either. If Jefferson Pinkard could see the possibilities, he would also be able to. But all he said was, “Well, I’ll see what the President wants to do.” He was a cool customer. He didn’t get all excited—or he didn’t show it if he did. And the odds were that somebody was tapping his telephone, too. Sure, he went back forever with Jake Featherston. All the more reason for Featherston to make sure he didn’t get out of line, wasn’t it?

Pinkard got off the phone. When you were talking with the higher-ups, you didn’t want to waste their time. He’d done everything he reasonably could. Now he had to wait and see if the Attorney General could run with the ball.

And he had to make sure the camp went on running smoothly, regardless of where the Yankees were. Ever since he first started taking care of prisoners during the Mexican civil war in the 1920s, he’d been convinced the only way you could keep your finger on the pulse of what was going on was by seeing for yourself. A lot of ways, his office looked like any other Confederate bureaucrat’s. Most bureaucrats, though, didn’t have a submachine gun hanging on the wall by their desk. Pinkard grabbed the weapon, attached a big snail-drum magazine, and went out to take a look around.

A couple of junior guards fell in behind him when he did. That was all right; nobody armed had any business going into the camp alone except in an emergency. The puppies wouldn’t cramp Pinkard’s style. They wouldn’t know where he was going and what he was doing because he wouldn’t know himself till he started doing it. That often made his subordinates despair, but more than once it let him nip what could be trouble before it got too big to be easily nippable.

The guards at the barbed-wire-strung gates between the administrative compound and the camp proper saluted him. “Group Leader!” they chorused.

“At ease, at ease,” he said, returning the salute. Part of him liked being treated like the equivalent of a major general. Another part, the part that was a private during the Great War, thought it all a bunch of damn foolishness. Right now, that part had the upper hand.

After the guards let him and his watchdogs through the inner gate, they closed it behind him. Then they opened the outer gate. He and the younger men walked into the camp.

Even the stink seemed stronger on this side of the barbed wire. Maybe that was Jeff’s imagination. He couldn’t prove it wasn’t. But his nose wrinkled at the odors of unwashed skin and sewage. Skinny Negroes stared at him as if he’d fallen from another world. By the difference between his life and theirs, he might as well have.

The wreathed stars on either side of his collar drew the black men as honey drew flies. “You gots to let me out, suh!” one man said. “You gots to! I’s an innocent man!”

“Kin we have us mo’ food?” another Negro asked.

“My fambly!” said another. “Is my fambly all right?”

“Everybody’s in here for a reason.” Jeff spoke with complete certainty. He knew what the reason was, too.
You’re a bunch of niggers.
Oh, the Freedom Party still ran camps for white unreliables, too. The whole camp system cut its teeth on them. But not many white unreliables were left any more. The Party also had better ways to get rid of them these days. Slap a uniform on an unreliable, stick a rifle in his hands, put him in a punishment battalion, and throw him at the damnyankees. Most of those people loved the United States, anyway. Only fair they should die at U.S. hands. And if they took out a few soldiers in green-gray before they got theirs, so much the better.

“Food!” that second Negro said. “We’s powerful hungry, suh.”

“I’m spreading out the ration best way I know how,” Pinkard said, which was true—all the inmates starved at the same rate. “If I had more, I’d share it out, too.” That was also true; he was cruel because he found himself in a cruel situation, not because he enjoyed cruelty for its own sake. He understood the difference. Whether a scrawny black prisoner did…mattered very little to him.

When the scrawny black looked at him, it wasn’t at his fleshy face but at his even fleshier belly.
You ain’t missed no meals.
The thought hung in the air, but the Negro knew better than to say it. He turned away instead, hands curling into useless fists.

As for the man with the family, he was already gone. He must have realized he wouldn’t get any help from Jeff Pinkard. And he was right. He wouldn’t. Other blacks came up with their futile requests. Jeff listened to them, not that it did the blacks much good.

Every once in a while, though, somebody betrayed an uprising or an escape plot. All by itself, that made these prowl-throughs worth doing. The ones who did squeal got their reward, too: a big supper where the other inmates could watch them eat, and a ride out of Camp Determination…in one of the sealed trucks that asphyxiated their passengers.

That was a shame, but what could you do? The CSA had no room for Negroes any more, not even for Negroes who played along.

Guards kept a long file of men moving toward the bathhouse. “Come on!” one of them called. “
Come
on, goddammit! You don’t want to be a bunch of lousy, stinking niggers when we ship your asses out of here, do you?”

Jeff Pinkard smiled to himself. By the time the Negroes got out of the bathhouse, they wouldn’t care one way or the other—or about anything else, ever again. But as long as they didn’t know that beforehand, everything was fine.

“Y
ou, there!
Sí,
you.
Mallate!
”

Scipio stared in alarm. Were he white, he would have turned whiter. The guard with the sergeant’s stripes was pointing at him. He hadn’t been in Camp Determination long before he realized you didn’t want guards singling you out for anything at all. And
mallate
from a Sonoran or Chihuahuan, as this fellow plainly was, meant the same thing as
nigger
from an ordinary white Confederate.

He had to answer. The only thing worse than getting singled out by a guard was pissing one off. “Yes, suh? What you need, suh?”

“You named, uh, Xerxes?” asked the swarthy, black-haired sergeant.

“Yes, suh. That’s my name.” At least the man wasn’t asking for him as Scipio. Even though he used it here himself, hearing it in a guard’s mouth might mean his revolutionary past in South Carolina had popped up again. If it had, he was a dead man…a little sooner than he would be anyway. Once you landed in here, your chances weren’t good any which way.

The guard gestured with his submachine gun. “You come here.” Did some special school teach guards that move? They all seemed to know it. It was amazingly persuasive, too.

“I’s comin’,” Scipio said. If you told a guard no, that was commonly the last thing you ever told anybody.

Legs light with fear, Scipio stepped away from Barracks 27. Even
I’s comin’
might be the last thing he ever told anyone. That sergeant and his two white flunkies looked ready to chalk him up to “shot while attempting to escape.”

“You know two women named Bathsheba and Antoinette?” the guard demanded. In his mouth, Scipio’s wife’s name came out as
Bat’cheba;
Scipio almost didn’t recognize it.

But he nodded. “Yes, suh, I knows dey,” he said. Fear and hope warred, leaving his voice husky. “Is dey—Is dey all right?” He had to fight to get the words out.

“They all right,
sí.
” The guard nodded, too. “They say, they hope you all right, too.”