In at the Death (29 page)

“For you, Congresswoman,” the page whispered. He handed her an envelope and took off before she could even thank him.

She opened the envelope and unfolded the note inside.
Come see me the second you get this
—
Franklin
, it said. She recognized the Assistant Secretary of War’s bold handwriting.

Any excuse to get away from this dreary debate was a good one. She hurried out of Congressional Hall—leaving was much easier than getting in—and flagged a cab. The War Department was within walking distance, but a taxi was faster. When Franklin Roosevelt wrote,
Come see me the second you get this
, she assumed he meant it.

“Heck of a thing about this Russian town, isn’t it?” the driver said.

“I’m sorry. I haven’t heard any news since early this morning,” Flora said.

“Bet you will.” The cabby pulled up in front of the massive—and badly damaged—War Department building. “Thirty-five cents, ma’am.”

“Here.” Flora gave him half a dollar and didn’t wait for change. A newsboy waved papers and shouted about Petrograd, so something
had
happened in Russia. Maybe the Tsar was dead. That might help the USA’s German allies.

She hurried up the scarred steps. At the top, her Congressional ID convinced the guards that she was who she said she was. One of them telephoned Roosevelt’s office, deep in the bowels of the building. When he’d satisfied himself that she was expected, he said, “Jonesy here’ll take you where you need to go, ma’am. Somebody will check you out as soon as you get inside.”

Check you out
was a euphemism for
pat you down
. The tight-faced woman who did it took no obvious pleasure from it, which was something, anyhow. After she finished and nodded, Jonesy—who looked even younger than Flora’s own Joshua—said, “Come along with me, ma’am.”

Down they went, stairway after stairway. Her calves didn’t look forward to climbing those stairs on the way up. Franklin Roosevelt had a special elevator because of his wheelchair, but no mere Congresswoman—not even a former First Lady—got to ride it.

“Here we go.” Jonesy stopped in front of Roosevelt’s office. “I’ll take you up when you’re done.”
Don’t go wandering around on your own
. Nobody ever came out and said that, but it always hung in the air.

The captain in the Assistant Secretary of War’s outer office nodded to Flora. “Hello, Congresswoman. You made good time. Go right in—Mr. Roosevelt is expecting you.”

“Thanks,” Flora said. “Can you tell me what this is about?”

“I think he’d better do that, ma’am.”

Shrugging, Flora walked into Franklin Roosevelt’s private office. “Hello, Flora. Close the door behind you, would you, please? Thanks.” As always, Roosevelt sounded strong and jovial. But he looked like death warmed over.

He waved her to a chair. As she sat, she asked, “Now will you tell me what’s going on? It must be something big.”

“Petrograd’s gone,” Roosevelt said bluntly.

“A newsboy outside was saying something about that,” Flora said. “Why does it matter so much to us? To the Kaiser, sure, but to us? And what do you mean, gone?”

“When I say gone, I usually mean
gone
,” Franklin Roosevelt answered. “One bomb. Off the map. G-O-N-E. Gone. No more Petrograd. Gone.”

“But that’s imposs—” Flora broke off. She was as far from Catholic as she could be, but she felt the impulse to cross herself even so. She was glad she was sitting down. “Oh, my God,” she whispered, and wanted to start the mourner’s Kaddish right after that. “The Germans…Uranium…” She stopped. She wasn’t making any sense, even to herself.

But she made enough sense for Roosevelt. He nodded, his face thoroughly grim. “That’s right. They got there first. They tried it—and it works. God help us all.”

“Do they have more of them?” Questions started to boil in Flora’s head. “What are they saying? And what about the Russians? Have England and France said anything yet?”

“We got a ciphered message yesterday that made me think they were going to try it,” the Assistant Secretary of War said. “They were cagey. I would be, too. Wouldn’t be good to say too much if the other side is reading your mail, so to speak. And the Kaiser just talked on Wireless Berlin.” He looked down at a piece of paper on his desk. “‘We have harnessed a fundamental force of nature,’ he said. ‘The power that sets the stars alight now also shines on earth. A last warning to our foes—give up this war or face destruction you cannot hope to escape.’”

“My God,” Flora said, and then again, “My God!” Once you’d said that, what was left? Nothing she could see—not for a moment, anyhow. Then she did find something: “How close are we?”

“We’re getting there,” Roosevelt said, which might mean anything or nothing. The exasperated noise Flora made said it wasn’t good enough, whatever it meant. Roosevelt spread his hands, as if to placate her. “The people out in Washington say we’re getting close,” he went on. “I don’t know if that means days, weeks, or months. They swear on a stack of Bibles that it doesn’t mean years.”

“It had better not, not after all the time they’ve already used and all the money we’ve given them,” Flora said. If not for the money, she never would have known anything about the U.S. project. And she found another question, one she wished she didn’t need to ask: “How close is Jake Featherston?” Even with the Stars and Stripes flying in Richmond for the first time since 1861, she thought of the Confederacy boiled down to the terrifying personality of its leader.

So did Franklin Roosevelt, as his answer showed: “We still think he’s behind us. We’re plastering his uranium works every chance we get, and we get more chances all the time, because we’re finally beating down the air defenses over Lexington. His people have put a lot of stuff underground, but doing that must have cost them time. If we’re not ahead, he’s got miracle workers, and I don’t think he does.”

“
Alevai
,” Flora said, and then, “Do they have any idea how many dead there are in Petrograd?” Part of her wished she hadn’t thought of that. Most of the dead wouldn’t be soldiers or sailors. Some would be factory workers, and she supposed you could argue that the people who made the guns mattered as much in modern war as the people who fired them. All the generals did argue exactly that, in fact. But so many would be street sweepers and dentists and waitresses and schoolchildren…Thousands? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? From one bomb? “My God!” she exclaimed again.

Franklin Roosevelt shrugged the broad shoulders that went so strangely with his withered, useless legs. “Flora, I just don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows yet—not the Germans, not the Russians, nobody. Right now…Right now, the whole world just took a left to the chops. It’s standing there stunned, trying not to fall over.”

That wasn’t the comparison Flora would have used, but it was vivid enough to make her nod. Before she could say anything—if she could find anything
to
say beyond one more “My God!”—the captain from the outer office came in and nodded to Roosevelt. “Sir, the Tsar just issued a statement.”

“What did he say?” Roosevelt and Flora asked at the same time.

The captain glanced down at a piece of paper in his left hand. “He calls this a vicious, unholy, murderous weapon, and he condemns the massacre of innocents it caused.” That went well with Flora’s thoughts.

“Did he say anything about surrender?” Franklin Roosevelt asked.

“No, sir.” The young officer shook his head. “But he did say God would punish the Kaiser and ‘the accursed scientists and people of Germany’—his words—even if the Russian Army couldn’t do the job.”

“How can he keep fighting if Germany can drop bombs like that and he can’t?” Flora asked, not really aiming the question at either Roosevelt or the captain. Was God listening? If He was, would He have let that bomb go off? “Moscow, Minsk, Tsaritsyn…” She ran out of Russian cities. She did, yes, but she was sure the Germans wouldn’t.

“Russia always takes more losses than her enemies,” the Assistant Secretary of War said. “That’s the only way she stays in wars. But losses on that kind of scale? I don’t think so, not for long.”

“If the Tsar tries to go on fighting and the Germans drop one of those on Moscow, say, don’t you think all the Reds who’ve gone underground will rise up again?” the captain asked. “Wouldn’t you?”

“How many Reds
are
left?” Flora asked. “Didn’t the Tsar’s secret police kill off as many as they could after the last civil war?”

“They sure did,” Franklin Roosevelt said, and the captain nodded. Roosevelt went on, “We know the secret police didn’t get everybody, though. And the Reds are masters at going underground and staying there.”

“They have to be, if they want to keep breathing,” the captain added.

“So the short answer is, nobody—nobody on this side of the Atlantic, that’s for sure—knows how many Reds there are,” Roosevelt said. “Something like a uranium bomb will bring them out, though, if anything will.”

“And if
it
doesn’t kill them,” the captain said. “Chances are, there are a lot of them close to Petrograd and Moscow.”

Flora nodded. Those were the two most important Russian cities, and the Reds were like anybody else—they’d want to stay as close to the center of things as they could. Her thoughts went west. “England and France have to be shaking in their boots right now,” she said. “Unless they’ve got bombs of their own, I mean.”

“If they had them, they would use them,” Roosevelt said. “The war in the west has turned against them—not as much as the war here has turned against the CSA, but enough. If the Kaiser’s barrels really get rolling across Holland and Belgium and northern France, it won’t be easy to stop them this side of Paris.”

“Paris,” Flora echoed. The Germans hadn’t got there in 1917; the French asked for an armistice before they could. Kaiser Wilhelm granted it, too. Looking back, that was probably a mistake. Like the Confederates, the French weren’t really convinced they’d been beaten. “This time, the Germans ought to parade through the streets, the way they did in 1871.”

“Sounds good to me,” Roosevelt said. “Keep it under your hat, but I’ve heard Charlie La Follette’s going to go to Richmond.”

“Is it safe?” Flora asked.

“Not even a little bit, but he’s going to do it anyhow,” Roosevelt answered. “Abe Lincoln couldn’t, God knows James G. Blaine couldn’t, even my Democratic cousin Theodore couldn’t, but La Follette can. And there’s an election this November.”

“Good point,” Flora agreed. How many votes would each photo of President La Follette in the ravaged and captured capital of the Confederacy be worth? Maybe as many as the uranium bomb had killed, and that was bound to be a lot.

VIII

I
n! In! In!” Sergeant Hugo Blackledge bellowed. “Move your sorry asses before you get ’em shot off!”

Corporal Jorge Rodriguez hurried aboard the little coastal freighter. Fires in Savannah lit up the docks almost bright as day. Every so often, a flash and a boom would mark another ammo dump or cache of shells going up in smoke. The port was falling. Anybody who stayed to try to hold up the damnyankees would end up dead or a POW. Orders were to get out as many soldiers as could escape.

Nervously, Rodriguez looked up into the sky. If any fighters came over right now, they could chew his company to pieces. But they mostly stayed on the runways after dark. With a little luck, this ship—the
Dixie Princess
, her name was—would be far away from Savannah by the time the sun came up.

“Ever been on a boat before?” Gabe Medwick asked.

“No,” Jorge admitted. “You?”

“A little rowboat, fishin’ for bluegill an’ catfish,” his friend said. “This ain’t the same thing, is it? Not hardly.” He answered his own question.

Soldiers from eight or ten regiments—not all of them even from the same division—jammed the
Dixie Princess
. They eyed one another like dogs uncertain whether to fight. Sailors in gray dungarees elbowed their way through the butternut crush. They knew where they were going and what they were doing, which gave them a big edge on the troops they were carrying.

The rumble of the engines got deeper. Rodriguez felt the deck vibrate under his boots. The freighter pulled away from the pier and down the Savannah River toward the sea.

Only gradually did Jorge realize there were antiaircraft guns on deck. More sailors manned them. Some wore helmets painted gray. Others stayed bareheaded, as if to say a helmet wouldn’t make any difference in what they did. A soldier near Jorge lit a cigarette.

“Kill that, you dumb dipshit!” Sergeant Blackledge yelled. “Kill it, you hear me? You want some damnyankee to spot your match or your coal? Jesus God, how fuckin’ stupid are you, anyways?”

“All right, all right,” the offender muttered. Down to the deck went the smoke. A boot mournfully crushed it out.

“Now, when it gets light y’all got to keep your eyes peeled for damnyankee submarines,” Blackledge went on. “One of them fuckers puts a torpedo in our guts, it’s a hell of a long swim to land, you know what I mean?”

“Boy,” Gabriel Medwick muttered, “he sure knows how to make a guy feel safe.”

Jorge laughed. That was so far wrong, it was funny. It would have been funny, anyway, if he weren’t aboard this floating coffin. How many men were with him? He wasn’t sure, but it had to be a couple of thousand. A damnyankee submersible skipper who sank the
Dixie Princess
would probably get the biggest, fanciest medal the USA could give out.

“You reckon it’s true, what happened to that town in Russia?” somebody not far away from him asked.

“It’s bullshit, you ask me,” another soldier answered. “Damn Kaiser’s just runnin’ his mouth. Stands to reason—a city’s too fuckin’ big for one bomb to take out.”

“You hear about that?” Medwick asked Jorge.

He nodded. “I hear,
sí
, but I don’t know what to believe. What do
you
think?”

“I hope like anything it’s bullshit,” his buddy said. “If it ain’t…If it ain’t, we all got more trouble than we know what to do with. If the Germans have a bomb like that, if it’s really real, how long before the Yankees do, too?”

“¡Madre de Dios!”
Jorge crossed himself. “One bomb, one city? You couldn’t fight back against something like that, not unless…Maybe we get those bombs, too.”

“Maybe.” Gabe seemed doubtful. “If we get ’em, we better get ’em pretty damn quick, that’s all I got to say. Otherwise, it’s gonna be too late.”

He wasn’t wrong, however much Jorge wished he were. The fall of Savannah meant the Confederate States were cut in half. People were saying that Richmond had fallen, too, and that Jake Featherston had got out one jump ahead of the U.S. soldiers coming in. Some people said he
hadn’t
got out, but that didn’t seem to be true, because he was still on the wireless.

What can I do about any of that?
Jorge wondered. The only answer that occurred to him was,
Not much
. He yawned; it had to be somewhere not long after midnight. He couldn’t even lie down and go to sleep: no room to lie down. He dozed a little standing up, the way only a tired veteran could.

Dawn was just painting the eastern horizon—all ocean, flat out to the edge of the world—with pink when he saw another ship ahead. No, it was a boat, much smaller than the
Dixie Princess
. It had a blinker that flashed Morse at the freighter. Up on the bridge, where no soldiers were allowed, a sailor—maybe an officer—answered back.

“What’s going on?” Gabe Medwick asked around a yawn.

“Beats me,” Jorge answered. “We just gotta wait and find out.” If that didn’t sum up a lot of soldiering, what did?

The
Dixie Princess
changed course and followed the smaller craft toward the low-lying coast ahead. Her guide zigged and zagged in a way that made no sense to Jorge. And whatever the guide did, the
Dixie Princess
did, too.

Then somebody said, “We better not hit one of them damn mines, that’s all I got to say. That’d be worse’n getting torpedoed.”

A light went on in Jorge’s head. They had to be heading towards a port, one warded by mines to keep out U.S. warships. And the small boat knew the way through the floating death traps. Jorge hoped like hell it did, anyhow.

WELCOME TO BEAUFORT
, a sign said. Jorge would have guessed the name was pronounced
Bofort
. What his guess was worth, he found out when a man with bushy white side whiskers called, “Welcome to Bew-fort, y’all! Where d’you go from here?”

Jorge hadn’t the faintest idea. Somebody—probably an officer—called, “Where’s your train station?”

“Mile outside o’ town,” the old-timer said, pointing west. “We like our peace and quiet, we do. Ain’t but one train a day anyways.”

“Jesus H. Christ!” the officer exploded. “This is as bad as it would’ve been before the War of Secession!”

“No, sir.” The white-whiskered man shook his head. “We had the hurricane back in ’40, and the really bad one back in ’93, an’ we came through both o’ them. And besides, we was full o’ niggers in the old days. Ain’t hardly got no more coons around now, though. Don’t hardly miss ’em, neither. More room for the rest of us, by God.”

Odds were the Negroes had done most of the hard work. Sailors had to jump down from the
Dixie Princess
and grab the mooring lines that bound her to the pier. Gangplanks thudded onto the rickety planking.

“Disembark! Form up in column of fours!” an officer shouted. “We will proceed to the railroad station and board transportation for Virginia!”

“Well, now we know what we’re doing, anyway,” Gabe Medwick said.

“
Sí
.” Jorge nodded. “But one train a day? How big a train is it gonna be? How long we gonna have to wait?” He looked up at the sky, which was sunny and blue. “We ain’t that far from Savannah, even now. What if a damnyankee airplane sees us? They come and drop bombs on our heads, that’s what.”

“Better not happen, that’s all I’ve got to say.” Medwick shivered at the idea, though the day felt more like spring than winter.

Down the gangplanks went the soldiers. As corporals, Jorge and Gabe tried to gather their squads together, but they didn’t have much luck. The soldiers had got too mixed up in the desperate boarding in Savannah. “Hell with it,” Sergeant Blackledge said—he was trying to gather a whole section, and having no more success than the squad leaders. “We’ll sort things out when we get wherever the hell we’re going.”

They marched through Beaufort. Though it wasn’t at all far from Savannah, the war might have forgotten all about it. Only some small, shabby houses with broken windows and with doors standing open spoke of the blacks who’d lived here till not long before.

Old men and those too badly maimed to fight—and a few women, too—crewed fishing and oystering boats. Truck gardens grew all around the town. Women and kids and the old and injured tended them, too.

At the station, the railroad agent stared at the long butternut column in unabashed horror. “What in God’s name am I supposed to do with y’all?” he said.

“Get on the telegraph. Get trains down here, dammit,” an officer answered. “We got out of Savannah. They want us up in Virginia. Fuck me if we’re gonna walk.”

“Well, I’ll try,” the agent said doubtfully.

“You better.” The officer—he was, Jorge saw, a colonel, with three stars on each side of his collar—didn’t even bother disguising the threat.

The agent clicked away on the telegraph. A few minutes later, an answer came back. “They’ll be here in two-three hours,” he reported.

Jorge would have bet that the time promised would stretch, and it did. The trains didn’t get there till midafternoon. He had enough food in his pockets and pouches to keep from getting hungry before then, but he wondered if anybody would feed the soldiers on the way north. He wondered how bad the fighting would be, too. He’d served in Virginia before coming down to Tennessee.
Wherever things get tough, that’s where they send me
. He was surprised at how little he resented that. It wasn’t as if he were the only one in the same boat.

On the train, his two stripes won him a seat, even if it was hard and cramped. What with all the men standing in the aisles, he counted himself lucky. No matter how uncomfortable he was, he didn’t stay awake long.

His eyes opened again when the train rolled through the town of St. Matthews. Except for a good many women wearing widow’s weeds, the place seemed as untouched by the war as Beaufort. Jorge wasn’t used to landscapes that hadn’t been torn to bits. A town with all its buildings intact, without barricades and foxholes and trenches, seemed unnatural.

“It does, doesn’t it?” Gabe Medwick said when he remarked on that. “It’s like the place isn’t important enough to blow up, almost.”

Jorge hadn’t looked at it quite like that, which didn’t make Gabe wrong. He turned to ask one of the soldiers in the aisle what he thought, only to discover that the man was sound asleep standing up, much deeper under than Jorge had been on the
Dixie Princess
. How exhausted did you have to be to lose yourself so completely while you were upright?

After that, the train passed into North Carolina. There was a sign by the tracks that said so. The license plates on the autos went from white with blue letters and numbers to orange with black. Other than that, he couldn’t see any difference. If the Confederate States had a safe haven, he was rolling through it.

Somebody at the front of the car dished out ration tins from a crate. They weren’t good, but they were better than nothing. Drinks were bottles of Dr. Hopper, warm and fizzy. Jorge belched enormously.

Virginia was another sign at the border, and motorcar license plates with yellow characters on a dark green background. It was also, before long, the cratered, shattered, bombed-out landscape Jorge had grown used to. He nodded to himself. He knew what he’d be doing here.

R
and R. Armstrong Grimes had gone out of the line in hostile country before. Did the people in Utah hate U.S. soldiers even more than the people here in Georgia did? He wouldn’t have been surprised. But the locals here had nastier weapons with which to make their lack of affection known.

That meant Camp Freedom—the name had to be chosen with malice aforethought—had maybe the most extensive perimeter Armstrong had ever seen. Foxholes and barbed-wire emplacements and machine-gun nests and entrenchments gobbled up the fields for a couple of miles around the camp on all sides.

“Shit on toast,” Squidface said as Armstrong’s weary platoon made its way through the maze of outworks. “What all’s inside here, the fucking United States mint?”

“They don’t have soldiers, the bad guys go and take the mint away,” Armstrong said.

“Well, yeah, Sarge, sure.” Squidface spoke in calm, reasonable tones. “But they care about money, and they mostly don’t care about us.”

Armstrong grunted. It wasn’t as if the PFC were wrong. Soldiers got the shitty end of the stick every day of the week, and twice on Sundays. If the other side didn’t screw you, the assholes in green-gray who stayed safe behind the line would. The only people he trusted these days were smelly, dirty men in ragged uniforms that said they actually did some fighting. They knew what was what, unlike the jerks who campaigned with typewriters and telephones.

He didn’t love MPs, either, not even a little bit. One of the snowdrops—he wore a white helmet and faggy white gloves—pointed and said, “Delousing station and showers are over that way. Where’s your officer, anyway?”

“In the hospital.” Armstrong jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “This is my outfit now.”

The MP sniffed. A platoon with a sergeant in command couldn’t be anything much, his attitude said. Somebody from the back of the platoon said, “Boy, Featherston’s fuckers’d send him to Graves Registration in nothing flat.”

“Who said that, goddammit?” the MP shouted. “I’ll kick the crap out of you, whoever you are.”

“Don’t worry, Sergeant. I’ll deal with him,” Armstrong promised. All right, so the snowdrop wasn’t yellow. But he didn’t realize combat troops wouldn’t fight fair. They’d ruin him or kill him, and then laugh about it. Getting away in a hurry was the best plan.

Back in the Great War, Armstrong’s father said, delousing meant baking your clothes and bathing in scalding water full of nasty chemicals, none of which kept the lice down for long. The spray that a bored-looking corporal turned on the men now was nothing like that. But it had one advantage over the old procedure: it really worked.

There was nothing wrong with showering under scalding water. “Wish I had a steel brush, to get all the dirt off,” Squidface said, snorting like a whale.

“Yeah, well, if you didn’t have a goddamn pelt there, you could get clean easier,” Armstrong said. Squidface was one of the hairiest guys he’d ever seen—he had more hair on his back than a lot of guys did on their chest. “If the Confederates ever kill you, they’ll tan your hide for a rug.”