Drive to the East (62 page)

Forrest looked unhappy. “Sir, what I know is, the damnyankees are chewing up men and barrels and airplanes we can’t afford to lose. They’ve got more people than we do, dammit, and that’s what they’re using. Between us, we and the Yankees’ve knocked Pittsburgh cockeyed. They squat in the ruins and potshoot us.”

“We’ll lick ’em,” Jake declared. “That’s why every infantryman’s got an automatic weapon. Put enough lead in the air and the other guys fall over dead.”

“Sir, it’s not that simple,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said. “Fighting like that, there are no good targets. They make us come to them, and then they make us pay for coming. We’ve got crack regiments knocked down to the size of a couple of companies. Units just aren’t the same when you have to rebuild ’em after losses like that. It’s the same way with barrels. They pick a spot, they wait, and then they shoot first. Their new models aren’t as good as ours, but getting the first shot off counts for a hell of a lot, especially at short range. We’re losing barrels as fast as we can build ’em. And we’re losing veteran crews, too. That just isn’t good terrain for armor to attack in.”

“Whatever we’re losing, they’re losing worse,” Jake said.

Forrest nodded, which didn’t mean he agreed. “Yes, sir. They are,” he said. “But they can afford it better. This is how we got in trouble in the last war.”

He hadn’t been old enough to fight in the last war. Jake had been in it from first day to last. That a pup should have the nerve to tell him what had happened and what hadn’t . . . “We are going to take Pittsburgh,” Featherston said in a voice like iron. “We
are.
We’ll take it, and we’ll hold it, and if the damnyankees want it back they’ll have to kiss our ass. That’s the way it’s gonna be, General. Have you got it?”

“Yes, sir.” Nathan Bedford Forrest III got to his feet. He stood at stiff attention. He saluted with machinelike precision. He did a smart about-turn and marched out of the President’s office. He didn’t slam the door. He closed it silently, which was even more sarcastic.

“I haven’t convinced that man,” Jake muttered. But Forrest would follow orders when he got them. That was what soldiers were for. And Pittsburgh
would
fall. And when it did, the United States would have to make peace. They couldn’t very well fight a war if they didn’t have anything to fight with, could they?

Sometimes the fellows in the fancy uniforms started flabbling over nothing. Forrest hadn’t been one to do that, but he was doing it now. Jake had no doubts. He hardly ever had doubts. That was why he’d got where he was, why the Freedom Party had got where it was. People with doubts stopped before they ought to. If you just kept going, you’d get there. And he was going to get Pittsburgh.

Lulu came in. “Mr. President, Mr. Goldman is here to see you. He says it’s urgent.”

“Well, then, I’d better find out what he wants, eh?” Jake wondered what had gone wrong. Something must have, or Saul wouldn’t come to his office uninvited.

The director of communications gave him the news in three bald words: “Another people bombing.”

“Son of a bitch!” Jake said. “Where? How bad?”

“Jackson, Mississippi, sir,” Goldman answered. “A waiter at a restaurant there last night. It was crowded—some kind of ladies’ club function. Eleven known dead, at least forty hurt.”

“Plus the nigger, of course,” Featherston said.

“Yes, sir. Plus him. Two other waiters were also injured.” Goldman paused. “How do you want to treat this, Mr. President? I hate to say it, but keeping quiet about what the Mormons are doing in the USA hasn’t worked.”

Jake knew why he hated to say it: saying it meant saying Jake Featherston was wrong. But Goldman
had
said it, and Jake couldn’t very well claim not talking about people bombs had kept them from scarring the CSA. He made a discontented noise down deep in his throat. He wanted to say exactly that. But he had to deal with the truth, no matter how little he liked it.

He thought for a few seconds, then nodded to himself. “All right. Here’s how we’ll play it. You can splash this one all over the papers, Saul. A ladies’ club, you say? Make it an atrocity story to end all atrocity stories, then. Nigger murders Confederate white women! That’ll make people’s blood boil. And you can let folks know all the coons’ll pay for what that one bastard went and did.”

Goldman didn’t always show everything he thought. By the way he brightened now, that was what he’d wanted to hear, and he’d wanted very much to hear it. “Yes, sir, Mr. President!” he said, enthusiasm bubbling in his voice. “That sounds like just the right line to take. I’ll handle everything. Don’t you worry about it.”

“I don’t,” Jake said simply. “If I worried about the way you did your job, Saul, somebody else would be doing it, and you can take that to the bank.”

“Uh, yes, sir,” Goldman said. Jake didn’t want him scared, so he made himself smile. That did the trick. Goldman got to his feet and said, “I’ll get right on it. If you’ll excuse me . . . ?”

“Go on, go on,” Featherston said indulgently. The director of communications hurried away. Jake got on the telephone. “Ferd? . . . You heard about the shit that happened in Jackson? . . . Yeah, Saul told me just now. Eleven dead plus the nigger! Jesus Christ! . . . How fast can you get the Party mobilized to help the cops and soldiers? . . . That quick? Good! . . . By this time Thursday, then, I don’t want one nigger left in Jackson—not one, you hear me? And when they get where they’re going, I don’t want ’em hanging around, either . . . You see to it, that’s all. ’Bye.” He hung up—he slammed down the telephone, as a matter of fact.

He wasted a few seconds swearing at the Mormons. Those damned fanatics had come up with a weapon other fanatics could use. Mississippi and Alabama had been in revolt since he took office, and they hadn’t been what anybody would call calm even before that. Too damn many coons, that was all there was to it. Well, he aimed to thin ’em out. And what he aimed at, he got.

He wondered whom Lulu would announce when she came in again. Instead of announcing anybody, she asked, “When was the last time you ate something, Mr. President?”

“Why—” Before Jake could finish talking, his stomach let out a rumble you could hear across the room. “Been a while, I guess,” he said sheepishly.

“I’ll get the kitchens to send you something.” She wagged a finger at him. “You’ve got to take care of yourself, you know.”

“Right,” Jake said. “I have been busy, you know.” He was amazed at how defensive he sounded. He could ream out the chief of the General Staff and stop him in his tracks. His own secretary? That was a whole different story. What made the difference? Lulu was right, and Nathan Bedford Forrest III damn well wasn’t. So he told himself, anyhow.

Not ten minutes later, Lulu came back with a tray with two thick roast-beef sandwiches, potato salad, and a bottle of beer. Jake got outside the food in nothing flat. He did feel better afterwards. He wasn’t about to admit it to her. On the other hand, he didn’t have to—she would already know.

His restless energy burned off what he ate and left him with the same lanky frame he’d had half a lifetime before. He knew he wasn’t as strong as he had been then, though. He wasn’t fat, but his muscles had gone soft and slack. He didn’t get the exercise he once had. Manhandling a field gun was a lot tougher physically than being President of the CSA and running things from behind a desk.

“I ought to put in time every day at . . . something hard, anyway,” he muttered to himself. “Something, dammit.” When you got past fifty, you had to take care of yourself the way you took care of a motorcar. You’d break down if you didn’t, and replacement parts for your carcass were mighty hard to come by.

But he had no idea what to do to keep fit. He couldn’t imagine himself playing golf or riding a bicycle or anything like that. Plain old calisthenics, like the ones from his Army days, were too boring to stand without a drill sergeant making you do them. And where would he find the time, anyway? He didn’t have time to do everything he needed to do now.

He muttered again, this time blasphemously. He knew what would happen. He
wouldn’t
find the time, and then six months or a year from now he’d be even angrier and more disgusted with himself, because he’d be that much further out of shape. He didn’t have any good answers, though. The only way he could find the time to exercise was to stop being President. He wasn’t about to do that.

Some of his pilots took pep pills to stay awake when they needed to fly mission after mission after mission. He’d always stayed away from those. Coffee and his own drive kept him going. But if coffee and his own drive flagged . . .

He shrugged. It was something to think about, anyway. He didn’t have to make up his mind once and for all right this minute. If he ever decided he needed those pills, he could get ’em.

R
ichmond. Capitol Square. A cool, gray, fall day, with the smell of burning leaves in the air—along with other, less pleasant, smells of burning and death. Clarence Potter sat on a bench in the bomb-cratered square and looked at the enormous pyramids of sandbags surrounding the great statues of George Washington and Albert Sidney Johnston. The Egyptians wouldn’t have been ashamed of pyramids like those. So far, they’d done their job. Despite all the damnyankee bombing raids, both statues remained more or less intact.

The Confederate Capitol couldn’t be sandbagged. It looked more like a ruin from the days of Greece and Rome than a place where important things happened. And important things didn’t happen there anymore. Congress met somewhere else these days—exactly where was classified. Potter wasn’t sure why. What difference did it make? Even if the USA blew Congress clean off the map, what difference would it make? Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party ran the CSA these days; Congress was a rubber stamp and a sounding board, and that was about it.

Potter lit a cigarette, adding more smoke to the air that had already made him cough twice. He looked at his watch. The man he was supposed to meet here was late, and he shouldn’t have been. Had something gone wrong?

But when he looked up, Nathan Bedford Forrest III was picking his way across the battered ground. Forrest already had a cigarette going, the coal furiously red. He sat down next to Potter and smoked in angry silence for a minute or so. Then he said, “I do thank you kindly for coming.”

“I should get out and about more often,” Potter answered. “Keeps me fresh. What’s on your mind?”

Instead of answering right away, Forrest lit another cigarette. He smoked it halfway down, blowing out an almost continuous stream of smoke. At last, he asked, “Do you . . . think Jake Featherston’s got all his oars in the water?”

Whatever Potter had expected, that wasn’t it. He looked around again to make sure nobody was paying extra attention to a couple of officers sitting on a park bench. Seeing nothing and no one out of the ordinary, he said, “Well, I haven’t always been in love with the man”—which was a bigger understatement than Nathan Bedford Forrest III might realize—“but I never thought he was ready for the straitjacket, either. How come you do?”

Forrest hesitated again. Potter had no trouble figuring out why—if he went telling tales to the President, the chief of the General Staff was a dead man. But Forrest must have known that before he asked to meet with Potter. The Intelligence officer gestured impatiently, as if to say,
Piss or get off the pot.
Unhappily, Forrest said, “Well, things aren’t going as well as we wish they were in Pittsburgh.”

“That makes me unhappy, but it doesn’t make Jake Featherston a candidate for the booby hatch.” Potter’s voice was desert-dry.

“No, of course not.” Nathan Bedford Forrest III looked down at the ground between his feet. He bent and picked up something: a little chunk of shrapnel from a bomb casing. With a grimace, he tossed it away. “But a few days ago I went and asked him if maybe we wouldn’t do better just wrecking Pittsburgh than throwing away more men and matériel than we can afford.”

“And?” Potter asked. “There’s always an ‘and’ to a story like that.”

“Oh, there is,” Forrest said. “And he damn near threw me out of his office—damn near threw me through the door, matter of fact. We’re going to take Pittsburgh, take it away from the damnyankees, come hell or high water, no matter how many soldiers or barrels or airplanes we lose. He . . . just wouldn’t listen to me. It was like he
couldn’t
listen to me. His mind was made up, and nothing anybody could say would change it.”

“And so?” Potter said. “The President’s never been what you’d call good at listening to other people or changing his mind. I don’t suppose he’d be President if he were, because he would have quit trying a long time ago.” Not liking Jake Featherston didn’t mean you could ignore his furious, driving, almost demonic energy.

“This wasn’t like a stubborn man talking,” Forrest said—stubbornly. “This was like—like a crazy man talking.” He looked relieved at finally getting that out. “By God, Potter, it really was.”

“All right. Let’s say it was.” Potter knew he sounded as if he might be humoring a lunatic himself. “If it was, what do you propose to do about it? Bear in mind that we’re in the middle of a small disagreement with our neighbors right now.” His wave encompassed the sandbagged statues, the cratered square, the ruins of the Confederate Capitol.

Nathan Bedford Forrest III’s eyes followed his hand. Forrest grimaced again, as if he hadn’t noticed how things were till then. Maybe he hadn’t—maybe he hadn’t let himself. “Jesus Christ, if we followed a nut into this war—”

“You didn’t reckon he was a nut as long as things went our way,” Potter said brutally. Forrest flinched. Potter went on, “Do you really think this is the time to start plotting a
coup d’état
? That’s what it would have to be, you know. You’d have to take him down. He’d never leave or change on his own.”

“I do understand that,” Forrest said. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. You were a red-hot Whig even after it wasn’t safe to be a Whig anymore.” He did know a fair bit about Potter’s past, then. “If anybody could see the need for putting our house in order, I reckoned you’d be the man. For God’s sake, Potter, we can’t afford to lose another war. It would ruin us for good.”