In at the Death (52 page)

“Um—I’m afraid not,” Morrell said.

“Pardon me?” Partridge raised a pale eyebrow.

“I’m afraid not,” Morrell repeated, more firmly this time. “You have surrendered—the Confederate States have surrendered—unconditionally. There is no Confederate government right now, sir. There isn’t anything, not till the United States say there is.”

“What does that make me, then?” President Partridge demanded.

“My prisoner, sir,” Morrell answered.

He’d captured a swarm of prisoners in the course of two wars. He’d never had one cuss him out with the virtuoso splendor Don Partridge showed. Partridge must have listened to his boss a lot; by all accounts, Jake Featherston could swear like a muleskinner. Morrell let Partridge have his say. Why not? In the end, it made no difference. The USA had the firepower, and the CSA didn’t.

“At a minute past six tonight, Mr. President, it’s all over,” Morrell said when Partridge finally ran down. “They’ll remember you as the man who made peace.”

“They’ll remember me as the man who threw in the sponge,” Partridge said. “Or else they won’t remember me at all.” Considering how little he’d done up till now, Morrell reflected, he might well be right.

T
he Confederates in front of Lavochkin’s Looters weren’t giving up without a fight. They kept firing even after word came that the Confederacy was giving up. Chester Martin stayed deep in his muddy foxhole. He was damned if he wanted to get hurt when it didn’t mean a thing. He just looked at his watch every now and then and waited for 6:01 to roll around.

Lieutenant Boris Lavochkin still gave the impression of eating too much raw meat. “If those assholes fire even one shot—even one—after surrender time, we’re going to roll on over them and clean them out!” he shouted.

We? You and your tapeworm?
Martin wondered. Didn’t the lieutenant know he was the only one who still felt like fighting? Maybe he didn’t, because he went right on yelling. But if he wanted to charge the C.S. position at 6:02, he’d do it by himself. Martin would have bet everything he owned on that.

The second hand spun round and round. The minute and hour hands didn’t seem to want to move, but they did. And when 6:01 came, Chester Martin lit a Raleigh and blew out a grateful cloud of smoke. “Son of a bitch!” he said. “I made it.”

He still didn’t straighten up or show himself. For all he knew, his watch was a couple of minutes fast. Then he heard a picket call, “Goddamn—they’re coming out!” The man sounded awed, not blasphemous.

Chester decided he could look out. Men in butternut were coming through the bushes, their hands high, their eyes either empty or else burning with hate. “Well, you’ve got us,” one of them said, spitting a stream of tobacco juice off to the side. “And a hell of a git you’ve got.”

He had a point. The Confederates were scrawny and filthy and ragged. Quite a few of them were walking wounded. They looked more like hoboes in uniform than soldiers. But they could fight. Through two wars, Chester had never found any reason to doubt that.

“Give ’em rations, boys,” Captain Rhodes called. “It’s all over now.” Lieutenant Lavochkin, Chester was sure, would never have said any such thing.

Once you got up into your fifties, you didn’t scramble out of a foxhole. You emerged with dignity. Coming into the open with the enemy in sight seemed dangerous, wrong, unnatural. Chester remembered that from 1917, too.

He caught the eye of the closest Confederate soldier—a kid who couldn’t have been more than sixteen. “Want some chow?” he asked.

“Much obliged,” the youngster answered. Martin tossed him a can. As he caught it, he said, “What’ll y’all do with us now?”

“Beats me,” Chester said. “Make sure we’ve got all your weapons, I bet—we have to take care of that. Then? Who knows? Somebody up top’ll tell us, and we’ll do it, whatever it turns out to be.”

“You did this before, didn’t you? You coulda fought against my pa, too,” the young Confederate said as he used the key to get the lid off the can.

“Yeah, well, we had to lick you people twice.” Chester wondered whether the kid even heard him. He was shoveling canned beef stew—which tasted like tire tread in mud gravy—into his mouth with his dirty fingers. It wasn’t one of the better U.S. rations, but the new POW didn’t care.

Not far away, Captain Rhodes was talking with a Confederate sergeant with a beer belly and gray stubble. The guy could have been a defeated butternut version of Martin himself—he was plainly a retread. “Take me to your demolitions people,” Rhodes was saying. “We want to make sure we get your explosives under control.”

“Well, I’ll do it, but we don’t have a hell of a lot of that stuff left,” the veteran noncom said.

“Cut the shit, Charlie,” Rhodes told him, which was almost exactly the thought going through Chester’s mind. “You figure you’re gonna squirrel that crap away for people bombs and auto bombs and toys like that? You better think twice, that’s all I’ve got to say. We
will
take hostages—lots of ’em. We’ll shoot ’em, too. If there’s not a white man left alive from Richmond to Key West, nobody in the USA’s gonna shed a tear. You can take that to the bank.”

The sergeant glared at him with undisguised loathing. “I believe you. You damnyankees are all a bunch of nigger-lovers.”

“I know one nigger I love right now—the kid who shot Jake Featherston,” Captain Rhodes answered. “Get it straight, Sergeant. Your government’s surrendered. If it hadn’t, how long did you have to live? A couple of days, maybe—not much more. After that, we would’ve flattened you like a steamroller. If you fuck with us now, we will anyway. And you know what else? We’ll enjoy doing it, too.”

Chester stared. No, that wasn’t Boris Lavochkin with an extra bar on each shoulder strap. Captain Rhodes was usually a pretty mild fellow. Usually, yeah, but not always. He meant every word of this.

And the C.S. sergeant knew it, too. “Well, come on, then,” he said. “I’ll take you to ’em. Just don’t blame me if they ain’t got everything you want.”

“I’ll blame somebody—that’s for damn sure.” Rhodes looked around. His eye lit on Chester. “Gather up a squad, Sergeant, and come along. We may need to do some persuading here.”

“Sure will, sir.” Martin rounded up a dozen men, just about all of them with automatic weapons instead of Springfields. They followed Captain Rhodes behind what had been the enemy line.

That was scary, especially with the sun sinking in the west. If somebody hadn’t got the word or just didn’t give a damn…Chester was sure there would be little spasms of fighting for days. He didn’t want to get stuck in one, that was all. And he didn’t want them to turn into a full-scale rebellion against the U.S. occupiers. If they did, the USA really might have to kill piles and piles of Confederate hostages. He didn’t look forward to that. No matter what Captain Rhodes said, he didn’t think it would be fun.

Not all the Confederate soldiers had put down their arms yet. The men in butternut scowled at the men in green-gray. Nobody did more than scowl, though. The enemy troops had to know about the surrender, even if they didn’t like it.

“If we were as big as the United States, we would’ve whipped y’all,” a corporal said.

“If pigs had wings, we’d all carry umbrellas,” Chester answered. “You so-and-sos shot me twice. That’s enough, goddammit. I don’t want your kids trying to shoot my kid.”

The U.S. soldiers walked past a battery of worn-looking 105s. Rhodes told off four or five men to take charge of the guns and their ammunition. “God only knows what a son of a bitch with an imagination can do with an artillery shell,” he remarked. Chester could think of a few things, all of them unpleasant. He was sure real explosives people could come up with a lot more.

He chatted with the Confederate veteran, who turned out to have also fought on the Roanoke front in the Great War. “Yeah, that was pretty bad, all right,” the other sergeant said. “I got hit twice—a bullet once, a shell fragment in the foot the other time.”

“I got it once then and once this time around,” Chester said. “Lucky, if you want to call it that. Shit, we both lived through two rounds, so we are lucky.”

“Plenty who didn’t—that’s for damn sure.” The Confederate pointed. “The people your captain’s looking for are just ahead there.”

As a matter of fact, they weren’t—they’d bugged out. But they’d left their stock in trade behind in earthwork revetments roofed with planks and corrugated sheet iron. Captain Rhodes set a guard over the explosives and fuses and blasting caps. Shaking his head, he said, “How many setups like this are there all over the CSA? How many’ll get emptied out before our guys show up? How much trouble is that gonna cost down the line?”

Lots. Quite a few. Quite a bit
. Chester had no trouble finding answers for questions like that. He looked around. This wasn’t good guerrilla country—too flat and too open. Other places, though…

Hearing them talking, an armed Confederate ambled up to see what was going on. His eyes widened. “Jesus!” he yipped. “You’re damnyankees!”

Chester grinned at him. “Nothing gets by you, does it?”

He stopped grinning a second later, because the Confederate soldier aimed a submachine gun at his midsection. “Hold it right there! Y’all are my prisoners.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Captain Rhodes said, though Chester noted that he kept his hands away from his .45. “Don’t you know your side surrendered?”

“My ass!” the man in butternut said. “We’d never do anything like that.”

“Go find some of your buddies,” Chester said. “Talk to them. We aren’t bullshitting you, man. How’d we get so far behind your line if we were just sneaking around?”

“Beats me.” The enemy soldier gestured with the submachine gun. “You come with me. If you’re lyin’, you’ll be sorry.”

“However you want.” Chester never argued with a man who could kill him. “Let’s go. I won’t even get mad after you find out what’s what.”

The other man turned out not even to know Jake Featherston was dead. He no more believed that than he believed his country had surrendered. And, no doubt to drive Chester crazy, they couldn’t find anybody else in butternut. That veteran sergeant had disappeared—with luck to head for a POW camp, without it to go off and make trouble.

At last, just as the sun was setting, they found another Confederate soldier. To Chester’s enormous relief, he had got the news. “’Fraid the Yankee’s tellin’ you the truth,” he said to his countryman. “It’s all over. We’re licked.”

“Son of a bitch bastard!” Chester’s erstwhile captor said. “If that ain’t the biggest crock o’ crap…We weren’t even losing.”

“Hello—this is South Carolina. What am I doing here if you guys are winning?” Martin asked. The Confederate gaped at him as if that had never once crossed his mind. Chester got the idea not a whole lot of things
had
crossed the other fellow’s mind. “Why don’t you hand me that piece so my guys don’t shoot you for having it?”

Reluctantly, the soldier in butternut gave him the submachine gun. Even more reluctantly, he raised his hands. “My pappy’s gonna whup me when he finds out I quit,” he said glumly.

“Not your fault,” Chester said. “The whole CSA gave up.”

“Pappy won’t care,” the soldier predicted. “He’ll whup me any old way.”

“Did he fight in the last war?” Chester asked.

“I hope to shit he did!”

“Then he gave up once himself. Tell him so.”

“Like he’ll listen. You don’t know Pappy.”

As far as Chester was concerned, that was just as well. “Let’s go back to the explosives shed,” he said. “I want my captain to know you found out we weren’t pulling your leg.”

“Still can’t hardly believe it. And the President bought a plot?” The Confederate shook his head. “Holy fuckin’ shit!”

He could cuss as much as he pleased. Chester had his weapon. He remembered the Navy guys who’d got torpedoed after the cease-fire in the Great War. Thank God he hadn’t gone that way himself!

G
eorge Enos, Jr., was thinking of his father as the
Oregon
steamed toward the surfaced Confederate submarine. That bastard of a sub skipper hadn’t wanted to quit when the Great War ended, so he’d fired one last spread of torpedoes—and little George grew up without a man around.

This submersible was playing by the rules. It had surfaced and broadcast its position by wireless. Now it was flying a large blue flag in token of surrender. Men in dark gray uniforms stood on the conning tower and on the deck, though nobody went near the deck gun. Taking on a battlewagon with that little excuse for a weapon was closer to insane than anything else, but you never could tell.

A lieutenant with a bullhorn strode up to the
Oregon
’s bow. “Ahoy, the Confederate sub!” he bawled. “Do you hear me?”

On the sub, a fellow in a dirty white officer’s cap raised a loudhailer to his own lips. “I hear you,” he answered. “What are your instructions?”

“Have you jettisoned your ammunition?”

“Yes,” the Confederate answered.

“Have you removed the breechblock from your gun?”

“Done that, too.”

“Are the pistols out of your torpedoes? Are the torpedoes rendered safe?”

“Yes. We’ve followed all the surrender orders.” The enemy officer didn’t sound happy about it.

“Do you have any mines aboard?” asked the lieutenant on the
Oregon
.

“No—not a one.”

“All right. We are going to send an officer and a CPO to inspect your boat before we give you your sailing instructions for Baltimore. Stand by to receive a boarding party.”

“Very well,” the Confederate skipper said. “But if the surrender order didn’t tell us we had to do exactly what you tell us, I would have something different to say to you.”

“You would be trying to sink us, and we would be dropping depth charges on your head,” the U.S. lieutenant said. “Things are what they are, though, not what you wish they were.”

“And ain’t that the sad and sorry truth?” the sub skipper said. “We will receive your boarders—we won’t repel them.” That made George think of pigtailed sailors with bandannas and cutlasses, and of clouds of black-powder smoke. No more, no more.