Drive to the East (3 page)

As it happened, he didn’t have to boot them today. Confederate guards took care of that. They burst into the barracks, submachine guns at the ready. “Everybody up!” they shouted. “Out of the sack, you lazy fuckers!” Even the yelling didn’t roust one POW. He could have slept through the Trump of Doom, but not through getting thrown out of bed onto the floor.

“What the hell?” he said plaintively, picking himself up.

No one paid any attention to him. The guards didn’t pay attention to any of the prisoners once they were out of the bunks. They paid attention to the bunks themselves, and to the number of slats that held each one up. They were not top-quality human material, to put it mildly—if they had been, they would have been up at the front. Some of them seemed to have trouble counting to eight.
Good thing there aren’t eleven slats,
Moss thought.
They’d have to take off their shoes.

“How come this here one’s only got seven?” one of them demanded.

“Because one of ’em damn well broke, because you damn well used cheap-shit wood when you made it,” answered the lieutenant whose bunk that was. His accent was identical to Cantarella’s, though he looked Irish rather than Italian. He also had the New Yorker’s way of challenging anything he didn’t like.

Moss didn’t give the guards a hard time. It struck him as cruising for a bruising. He’d seen the guards rough people up. That violated the Geneva Convention, but you couldn’t call them on it. They would say the roughee had it coming, and the camp commandant would back them right down the line.

Here, though, the guards didn’t push things. They grumbled and they fumed and then tramped out of the barracks. “What the hell was that all about?” asked a captain who’d been in Andersonville only a few days.

“Beats me,” somebody else answered—an officer who’d been a prisoner longer than Moss had.

It beat Moss, too. When he got the chance to ask Nick Cantarella, he did. Cantarella started laughing. “I’ll bite. What’s funny?” Moss asked.

“The Confederates know what they’re doing, that’s all,” Cantarella answered. He was still laughing, and didn’t care who heard him. He thought it was funny as hell. “If we’re digging a tunnel, those slats are about the best thing we could use to shore it up.”

“Oh.” A light dawned. “And if they’re not missing, then we’re not digging a tunnel?”

“I didn’t say that.” Cantarella was nothing if not coy. “You said that. With a little luck, the guards think that.”

“Then we
are
digging a tunnel?” Moss persisted.

“I didn’t say that, either. I didn’t say anything. It’s the waddayacallit—the Fifth Amendment, that’s it.”

Moss hadn’t had much to do with the Fifth Amendment while practicing law in occupied Ontario; it hadn’t crossed the border with the U.S. Army. It wasn’t as strong as it might have been in the USA, either. From the 1880s until the Great War, the United States had geared up for a rematch against the Confederacy. Nothing had got in the way of gearing up—and, thanks to a pliant Supreme Court, that nothing included big chunks of the U.S. Constitution.

When he expressed his detailed opinion of the Fifth Amendment and of the horse it rode in on, he just made Cantarella laugh some more. “Dammit, you know I’m legit now,” Moss groused. “The least you could do is tell me what’s going on.”

“Who says I know?” Cantarella answered. “I just work here.” Had he put a pot full of cold water on Moss’ head, it would have boiled in about thirty seconds. Moss’ face must have told him as much. When he laughed again, it was in some embarrassment. “Don’t ask for what I shouldn’t give you, buddy.”

“Why shouldn’t you?” Moss went on steaming. “Only reason I can see is that you still think I might
not
be the goods.”

“Then you aren’t looking hard enough.” The New Yorker’s voice took on a hard edge. “I don’t give a shit if you’re as legitimate as Teddy Roosevelt. The more people who know more stuff than they ought to, the better chance Featherston’s fuckers have of tearing it out of them. Have you got that through your goddamn thick head now, or shall I draw you a picture?”

“Oh.” Jonathan Moss’ temperature abruptly lowered. He didn’t like security concerns, but he understood them. “Sorry, Captain. I was out of line there.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Like most people, Cantarella was more inclined to be magnanimous after he’d got his way. “When the time comes—if the time comes—you’ll find out whatever you need to know. Till then, just relax. Let Jake Featherston pay your room and board—and your salary, too.”

“He needs to learn something about the hotel business. You’re not supposed to have to lock up your customers to get ’em to stay,” Moss said. Nick Cantarella thought that was funny as hell. Moss would have, too, if he’d been on the other side of the barbed wire.

F
or quite a while after rejoining the Confederate Army, Brigadier General Clarence Potter had worked underground, in War Department offices that officially didn’t exist. Intelligence tended to get quartered in places like that. For one thing, it was supposed to be secret. For another, if you didn’t have to look at spies, you could use what they gave you and still pretend to yourself that your hands were clean.

When he got the wreath around his three stars that meant promotion to general’s rank, he also got his unfortunate predecessor’s upstairs office. Being able to look out at Richmond instead of just walls was very nice. That is, it had been very nice till U.S. bombers started coming over Richmond in large numbers.

These days, only the foolhardy and those who had no choice worked above ground in the heart of the city. A lot of War Department operations had moved to the suburbs. Those that couldn’t had gone underground. Potter’s new office was only a few doors down from the one he’d had as a colonel. Returning to the subbasement, he’d displaced a captain, not the colonel who had the old room. As long as the electricity kept working, he could get the job done.

He stared at the papers on his desk through the bottoms of his bifocals. He was an erect, soldierly-looking man, nearer sixty than fifty, with iron-gray hair, a stern expression, and the same style of steel-rimmed glasses he’d worn as a major in Intelligence in the Army of Northern Virginia during the Great War (they hadn’t been bifocals then). The spectacles softened what would otherwise have been some of the coldest gray eyes anyone ever owned.

One of the reasons he glowered at those papers was that they should have got to him weeks before they did. Before the shooting started, he’d run Confederate espionage operations in the USA. Two countries hardly separated by language made spying here easier in many ways than it was in Europe. Some Confederate operatives had been in place in Washington and Philadelphia and elsewhere since before the Great War.

There were two problems with that. Shooting and moving armies and closed ordinary channels of mail and telegraphy made it harder for information to get across the border—which was why these papers were so late. The other problem was, what were the damnyankees doing in the CSA? Ease of spying cut both ways, worse luck.

Formally, counterintelligence was on Brigadier General Cummins’ football field, not his. He wasn’t sorry about that, or most of him wasn’t. Even guzzling coffee as if they’d outlaw it day after tomorrow, he did have to sleep every once in a while. He didn’t see how he could conjure up enough extra hours in the day to do a proper job if more responsibility landed on his head.

Jake Featherston and Nathan Bedford Forrest III, the head of the Confederate General Staff, thought he could handle it if he had to. He had a hard time quarreling with either of them, because they both had more in their laps than he did. But he was a relentless perfectionist in ways they weren’t, and couldn’t let go of things till they were exactly as he wanted them. He had enough insight to understand that that wasn’t always a desirable character trait. Understanding it and being able to do anything about it were two different things.

Someone knocked on the door. Down here, the rule was that you didn’t walk in till you were invited. Potter checked to make sure nothing sensitive was out in the open before he said, “Come in.”

“Thank you.” It was Nathan Bedford Forrest III. Potter started to come to attention; Forrest waved him back into his chair before the motion was well begun, saying, “Don’t bother with that silly nonsense.” The great-grandson of the cavalry raider in the War of Secession had a fleshier face than his famous ancestor, but his eyes, hooded under strong dark brows, proclaimed the relationship.

“Good morning, sir, or afternoon, or whatever time of day it is out there,” Potter said. “What can I do for you?”

Instead of answering right away, Forrest cocked his head to one side, an odd sort of smile on his face. “I purely love to listen to you talk, General—you know that?”

“You may be the only person in the Confederate States who does,” Potter answered. He’d gone to college up at Yale before the Great War. U.S. speech patterns and accent had rubbed off on him, not least because even then the Yankees had made things hard for Confederates in their midst. He’d wanted to fit in there, and he had—and he’d had a certain amount of trouble fitting into his own country ever since.

“But I know how useful it is to be able to talk like that,” Forrest said.

Quite a few of the C.S. spies Potter ran in the USA were Confederates who’d been raised or educated on the other side of the border. Sounding like a damnyankee helped a lot. It made real Yankees believe you were what you said you were, and was often more convincing than the proper papers. If you sounded right, you might never have to show your papers.

With a sour chuckle, Potter said, “It’s almost got me shot for a spy here a few times.”

“Well, that’s some of what I want to talk to you about.” Nathan Bedford Forrest III sank into the chair in front of Potter’s desk. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket of his butternut tunic, stuck one in his mouth, and offered Potter the pack. After Potter took one, Forrest lit them both.

They smoked for a couple of drags apiece. Potter knocked ash into a brass astray on the desk. He said, “If you think you’ve intrigued me . . . you’re right, dammit.”

The chief of the General Staff grinned at him, unabashed. “I hoped I might, to tell you the truth. I’m getting up a volunteer battalion I’m going to want you to help me vet.”

“Are you? A battalion of our people who can sound like damn-yankees?” Potter asked. Forrest nodded. Potter sucked in smoke till the coal at the end of his cigarette glowed a furious red. After he let it out, he aimed another question at his superior: “Are you putting them in U.S. uniforms, too?”

Nathan Bedford Forrest III didn’t jump. Instead, he froze into immobility. He clicked his tongue between his teeth after fifteen seconds or so of silence. “Well, General,” he said at last, “you didn’t get the job you’ve got on account of you’re a damn fool. If I didn’t know that already, you just rubbed my nose in it like I’m a puppy getting house-trained.”

“If they’re captured in enemy uniform, the United States will shoot
them
for spies,” Potter said. “We won’t be able to say boo about it, either. Under the laws of war, they’ll have the right.”

“I understand that. Everybody who goes forward with this will understand it, too,” Forrest answered. “You have my word on that, General. I already told you once, this is a project for volunteers.”

“All right,” Potter said. “But I did want to remind you. As a matter of fact, for something like that I was obliged to remind you. So where exactly do I fit in?”

“You’re the fellow who’s been running people who can sound like damnyankees and act like damnyankees.” Forrest stubbed out his smoke and reached for the pack to have another one. When he offered it to Potter this time, Potter shook his head. The chief of the General Staff lit up again. He sucked in smoke, then continued, “If they can be halfway convincing to you, they’ll be good enough to convince the enemy, too.”

“It’s not just accent.” Potter scratched his chin as he thought. “You can get away with flattening out the vowels some. Even swallowing
r
’s might make the Yankees think you’re from Boston or somewhere up there—what even the Yankees call a Yankee. But some things will kill you if the USA hears ’em coming out of your mouth.”

“
Banknote
is one,” Forrest said. “I know they say
bill
instead.”

“Just about everybody knows that one—just about everybody thinks about money a good deal,” Potter agreed. Nathan Bedford Forrest III laughed, though Potter hadn’t been kidding, or not very much. He went on, “They don’t say
tote
up there, either—it’s
carry.
And they mostly say
bucket
instead of
pail,
though you might get by with that one. You won’t ever get away with
windscreen;
they always say
windshield.
They might think somebody who says
windscreen
is an Englishman, but that won’t help anybody in a U.S. uniform much, either.”

“No, not hardly.” Forrest laughed once more: a grim laugh.

“What will you be using them for?” Potter quickly held up his right hand. “No, don’t tell me. Let me figure it out.” He thought for a little while, then nodded—at least as much to himself as to his superior. “Infiltrators. They have to be infiltrators. Get them behind the lines, giving false directions, sabotaging vehicles, putting explosives in ammunition dumps, and they’ll be worth a lot more than a battalion of ordinary men.”

Again, Forrest gave him a careful once-over before speaking. When he did, he said, “Shall I put you in an operational slot, Potter? If you want your own division, it’s yours for the asking.”

“I think I can do the damnyankees more harm right where I am, sir,” Potter replied. Nathan Bedford Forrest III didn’t argue with him. He thought a bit more. “Do you know what the really elegant part of the scheme is? As soon as the damnyankees realize we’ve got men behind their lines like that, nobody in a green-gray uniform will trust anybody he doesn’t know. And that’ll last for the rest of the goddamn war.”