In at the Death (36 page)

Maryland looked prosperous; Pennsylvania, when they got there, even more so. Oh, Potter spied bomb damage here and there, but only here and there. This land hadn’t been
fought over
the way so much of the CSA had. It had got nibbled, but not chewed up. The United States was too big a place for bombing alone to chew them up. Pittsburgh, now, Pittsburgh probably looked as if it had had a proper war, but Potter and his band of cutthroats headed east, not west.

Drivers in military vehicles coming the other way waved to him and honked their horns as they passed. He always waved back. They figured he was returning from the front with something important. Nobody bothered checking his papers or asking him where he was going or why. The United States
were
a big place. Once beyond the usual military zone, security for people who looked and sounded like U.S. soldiers eased off. He’d counted on that when he put this scheme together.

Jake Featherston wanted him to go all the way into downtown Philadelphia. He didn’t intend to. There of all places, security would tighten up again. He couldn’t afford to have anybody ask questions too soon. Some overeager goon with a Tommy gun or a captured automatic Tredegar could mess everything up if he got suspicious at just the wrong time.

No, not downtown. Potter stopped west of it, on the far side of the Schuylkill River. At his order, Wilton pulled into a parking lot. Potter ducked into the back of the truck and set two timers on the side of the crate—he wasn’t going to take chances with only one. The driver, meanwhile, raised the hood.

“What’s going on?” somebody called.

“Damn thing’s broken down,” Wilton answered. “We’ve got to round up a mechanic somewhere.”

He and Potter jumped into one of the command cars. “Back the way we came,” Potter said. “Fast as you can go.” He eyed the man who’d questioned them. The fellow only shrugged and ambled into a shop. Maybe he’d seen breakdowns before.

“How long, sir?” asked the corporal behind the command car’s wheel.

“Not long enough,” Potter said. “Step on it.”

Fifteen minutes later, the world blew up behind them.

I
rving Morrell wasn’t looking west when the bomb went off. He was standing at a counter, trying to decide between a chocolate bar and a roll of mints. All of a sudden, the light swelled insanely, printing his shadow on the wall in back of the sidewalk stand. The fat little old woman behind the counter screeched and covered her eyes with her hands.

“Good God!” Morrell said, even before the roar of the explosion reached him. His first thought was that an ammo dump somewhere had blown sky high. He didn’t think of a bomb. The explosion seemed much too big for that.

He forgot about the candy and ran out into the street. Then he realized just how lucky he’d been, because a lot of windows had turned to knife-edged flying shards of glass. The magazine stand and snack counter where he’d been dithering didn’t have a window of any sort, so he’d escaped that, anyhow.

He stopped and stared. He wasn’t the only one. Everybody out there was looking west with the same expression of slack-jawed disbelief. No one had ever seen anything like that rising, boiling, roiling cloud before. How high did it climb? Three miles? Four? Five? He had no idea. The colors put him in mind of food—salmon, peach, apricot. The top of the cloud swelled out from the base, as if it were a toadstool the size of a god.

The roar came then, not just in his ears but all through his body. He staggered like a drunken man. But it wasn’t his balance going; the ground shook under his feet. A blast of wind from nowhere staggered him. Also out of nowhere, rain started pelting down. The drops were enormous. They left black splashes when they hit the ground. When one hit his hand, he jerked in surprise—the rain was hot.

“Where’s it at?” somebody asked.

“Across the river, looks like,” a woman said.

It looked that way to Morrell, too. The rain shower didn’t last more than a couple of minutes. It hadn’t ended before he started trying to scrub the filthy drops from his skin. He remembered what John Abell had told him a few days before: uranium bombs put out poison. And what else could that horrible thing be? No ammunition dump in the world blew up like that.

How much poison was in the rain? How much was in that monstrous toadstool cloud?
Am I a dead man walking?
he wondered.

“We gotta go help,” said the man who’d asked where the blast was. He hurried toward the Schuylkill River.

His courage and resolve shamed Morrell. Of course, the stranger—who was plump and fiftyish, with a gray mustache—didn’t know what Morrell did. If ignorance was bliss…

After a moment’s hesitation, Morrell followed. If he was already poisoned, then he was, that was all. Nothing he could do about it now. Overhead, that cloud grew taller and wider. Winds began to tear at it and tug it out of shape…and blow it toward downtown Philadelphia.

Crowds got worse the farther west Morrell went. Everybody was pointing and staring and gabbling.
You fools! Don’t you realize you might all be dead?
No, Morrell didn’t shout it out. But it filled his thoughts.

Damage got worse the farther west he went, too. All the windows that had survived years of Confederate air raids were blown out. Motorcars and trucks had windows shattered, too. Drivers, their faces masks of blood, staggered moaning through the streets. Many of them clutched at their eyes. Morrell knew what that was bound to mean: they had glass in them.

As he neared Philadelphia’s second river, he saw buildings brutally pushed down and vehicles flipped onto their sides or upside down. Some men stopped to help the injured. Others pressed on.

And then Morrell got a chance to look across the Schuylkill. That part of the city was almost as heavily built up as downtown. Or rather, it had been. Next to Morrell, a skinny woman crossed herself. He felt like doing the same thing. Almost everything over there was knocked flat. A few buildings that must have been uncommonly strong still stood up from the rubble, but only a few.

A bridge across the Schuylkill survived, though it leaned drunkenly to one side. How long it would stay up, God only knew. People staggered across it from the west. Some had had the clothes burned off of them. Morrell saw several with one side of their face badly seared and the other fine: they must have stood in profile to the bomb when it went off.

“His shadow!” a dreadfully burned man babbled. “I saw his shadow on the sidewalk, all printed like, but not a thing left of George!” He slumped down and mercifully passed out. Morrell wondered whether he would ever wake. He might be luckier not to.

A loudspeaker started to blare: “All military personnel! Report at once to your duty stations! All military personnel! Report at once to—”

Morrell didn’t exactly have a duty station. He headed back to the War Department. The catastrophe across the river was bigger than any one man. And he had a better chance of finding out what was going on at the military’s nerve center.

So he thought, anyway. But one of the guards who patted him down asked, “What the hell happened, sir? Do you know?”

“Not exactly,” Morrell answered. “I was hoping people here did.”

Before a private took him down to John Abell’s office, he paused in a men’s room and washed off as much of the filthy rainwater as he could. “Why are you doing that, sir?” asked the kid, who went in with him.

“Just in case,” Morrell answered. Getting rid of the horrible stuff wouldn’t hurt. He was sure of that.

Abell always looked pale. He seemed damn near transparent now. He might have aged ten years in the few days since Morrell last saw him. “My God!” he said. “They beat us to the punch. I didn’t think they could, but they did.”

“Have you been up top?” Morrell asked. “Did you see it with your own eyes?”

“No.” Abell had always wanted to deal with things from a distance. Was that a strength or a weakness?
Probably both at once
, Morrell thought. The General Staff officer went on, “How did they get it here? They couldn’t have used an airplane—I swear to God they don’t have a machine that can carry it. And our Y-ranging gear didn’t spot a thing coming up from the south.”

“They must have sneaked it in, God damn them,” Morrell said. “Remember how they broke through in eastern Ohio? They had a whole battalion of guys in our uniforms, in our vehicles, who could talk like us. What do you want to bet they did the same damn thing again—and made it work?” He’d made it work himself, getting over the Tennessee River in front of Chattanooga.

Abell managed a shaky nod. Then he reached for a telephone. “With a little luck, they won’t get away. We can shoot every last one of them if we catch them in our uniforms.”

Morrell nodded. That was what the laws of war said. Whether the USA would want to shoot those Confederates if it caught them might be a different story. How much could they tell interrogators about their uranium-bomb project?

“We’d better catch them,” Abell said as he slammed down the telephone after barking into it with unaccustomed heat. “They can’t get away with that. How many thousands of people did they just murder?”

Would it have been better had the enemy dropped the bomb out of an airplane and then flown away? Would it have been better had he dropped ton after ton of ordinary bombs instead, or machine-gunned as many people as he’d killed in this one blast? Morrell found himself shaking his head. It wouldn’t have been any better, but it would have been more familiar. That mattered, too. The uranium bomb was something brand new. Poison gas had carried some of that same whiff of horror during the last war. People took it for granted now.

Would they come to take uranium bombs for granted, too? How could they, when each one could devastate a city? And these were just the early ones. Would next year’s model level a whole county, or maybe a state?

“My God,” Abell said again. “Those stinking crackers…and they beat us. There won’t be one stone left on top of another one by the time our bombers get through with Lexington—I’ll tell you that.”

The last time he and Morrell talked about uranium bombs, he’d waltzed around the name of the town where the CSA was working on them. This time, he’d slipped. He was human after all, and would probably have to do penance before the altar of Security the Almighty.

He realized as much a few seconds too late. “You didn’t hear that from me,” he said in some embarrassment.

“Hear what?” Morrell asked innocently.

“I wonder if we could drive down the Shenandoah Valley and take that place away from them,” Abell said. Even though he was embarrassed, now that the cat was out of the bag he was letting it run around.

“Wouldn’t take long to pull an assault force together.” Morrell spoke with the assurance of a veteran field commander. “Don’t know how hard the Confederates would fight back—hard as they can, I bet. Now that they’ve used one bomb, how long do they need to build another one?”

“That I can’t tell you, because I don’t know. I wouldn’t tell you even if I did, but I don’t,” Abell said. “Days? Weeks? Months? Twenty minutes? I just have no idea.”

“All right,” Morrell said. The General Staff officer was liable to lie about something like that, but Morrell didn’t think he was, not this time. He went on, “This would have been a lot worse if they’d brought it here by the government buildings instead of blowing it up across the river.”

“I don’t think they could have—it wouldn’t have been easy, anyhow,” Abell said. “We search autos and trucks before we let them in here. Auto bombs are bad enough, but put a couple of tons of high explosive in a truck…” He didn’t finish, or need to. “One of those was plenty to make us clamp down.”

“Good for you, then. You just saved the President and Congress and us. I mean, I hope you did.” Morrell told him about the black rain. “Exactly how dangerous is that stuff, anyway?”

“We’ll all find out. I don’t know the details. I’m not sure anybody does.” Abell looked down at his own soft, immaculately tended hands. “I do believe you were wise to wash off as much as you could. It’s like X-rays: you want to keep the exposure to a minimum.”

Morrell looked at his own hands and at his uniform, which still bore the marks of those unnatural drops. Were there little X-ray machines in them? Something like that, he supposed. Maybe there were more in the dust in the air. “We sure never learned any of this stuff at West Point,” he said.

“Who knew back then?” John Abell said. “Nobody, that’s who. Half of what we learned just went obsolete.”

“More than half,” Morrell said. “New rules from now on.”

“If we live long enough,” Abell said.

“Yeah. If.” Morrell looked at his splotched uniform again. “I think the new Rule Number One is,
Don’t get in a war with anybody who’s got this damn bomb
.”

“A little too late for that now,” the General Staff officer pointed out.

“Don’t remind me,” Morrell said.

I
’m Jake Featherston, and I’m here to tell you the truth.”

This wasn’t the familiar studio in Richmond, from which Jake Featherston had bellowed defiance at the world since the days when he was a discredited rabble-rouser at the head of a withering Freedom Party. He had no idea whether that wireless studio still stood. He would have bet against it. Richmond had fallen, but the Confederates put up a hell of a fight before they finally pulled out.

Portsmouth, Virginia, then. It wasn’t where Featherston wanted to be—he’d always wanted to broadcast in triumph from Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia.
And I will yet, goddammit
, he thought savagely. But Portsmouth would have to do for now. The station had a strong signal, and somehow or other Saul Goldman had patched together a web to send Jake’s words all over the CSA—and up into Yankeeland, too. If Saul wasn’t a wizard, he’d do till a real one showed up.

The speech. “Truth is, we just showed the damnyankees what we can do. Just like the Kaiser—one bomb, and
boom!
A city’s gone. Philadelphia will never be the same.” He didn’t exactly say the uranium bomb (no, from the reports he got from FitzBelmont, it was really a jovium bomb, whatever the hell jovium was) had blown up all of Philly. If his Confederate listeners wanted to think he’d said that, though, he wouldn’t shed a tear.