In at the Death (6 page)

Flora paid the driver, opened the cab’s door, opened her umbrella, and splashed up the broad stairs to the entrance to the War Department. She didn’t get
very
wet, but she didn’t exactly stay dry, either. At the entrance, soldiers examined her ID with remorseless care before letting her in. She didn’t get very far in even then, not at first. A hard-faced woman frisked her in a sandbagged revetment that could blunt the force of a people bomb. Only then did a private with peach fuzz escort her down, down, down to Franklin Roosevelt’s office.

“You look like something the cat dragged in,” the Assistant Secretary of War exclaimed. “Can I fix you a drink? Purely medicinal, of course.”

“Of course,” Flora said, deadpan. “Thanks. I’d love one.”

The medicinal alcohol turned out to be some fine scotch. “Confiscated from a British freighter,” Roosevelt explained. “I arranged for a friend of mine in the Navy Department to get some good Tennessee sipping whiskey, and this is how he scratched my back.”

“Nice to have friends,” Flora said. “I like scotch better, too.”

“I still owe him a little something, or maybe not such a little something,” Roosevelt said. “The Navy’s been nice to us lately.”

“Has it?” Flora said. When Roosevelt nodded, she went on, “Does that have something to do with why you called me over?”

He beamed at her. “I knew you were smart. It sure does. A few days ago, one of our destroyer escorts met the U-517 somewhere in the North Atlantic. The Navy and the Germans worked out just where. It doesn’t matter anyhow, except that they
did
meet. The skipper of the submersible passed a package to the skipper of the
Josephus Daniels
—that’s the destroyer escort. Our ship brought the package in to Boston, and now we’ve got it.”

“What is it?” Flora asked. “Something to do with uranium, unless I’m crazy.”

“Right the first time,” Franklin Roosevelt agreed. “We finally managed to talk the Kaiser into letting us know just how far along the Germans are.”

“And?”

“And they’re ahead of us. Well, no surprise—most of the top nuclear physicists come from Germany or Austria-Hungary, and Bohr from Denmark is working for them, too,” Roosevelt said. “But this will speed us up. I don’t know all the details yet. Our people are still trying to figure out what the details are, if you know what I mean. It’s good news, though.”

“Sounds like it,” Flora said. “Have we got any good news about these Confederate rockets?”

“Not much.” Roosevelt’s jaunty smile slipped. When it did, she could see how worn and weary he was. He looked like a man busy working himself to death. She couldn’t even say anything, because he was far from the only one doing the same thing. He paused to light a cigarette and suck in smoke through the holder he liked to use. “About all we can do is bomb their launchers, and they’ve made them portable, so the damn things—excuse me—aren’t easy to find.”

“And in the meantime we sit here and take it,” Flora said. “Can we bomb the factories where they make the rockets?”

“When we find ’em, we’ll bomb ’em,” Roosevelt promised. “I wish the Confederates would paint
Rocket Factory
on the roof in big letters. It sure would make reconnaissance a lot easier. We do keep plugging away.”

“I’m so glad,” Flora murmured, which made Roosevelt laugh. “What about the town where they’re working on uranium? Are we still giving it the once-over?”

“Every chance we get,” he replied. “They’ve got antiaircraft fire like you wouldn’t believe all around Lexington—oops. Pretend you didn’t hear that.”

“Pretend I didn’t hear what?” Flora said, and Franklin Roosevelt laughed again.

“Yeah, the flak is thick enough to land on, the pilots say,” he continued, “and they put night fighters in the air, too. They’ve quit pretending it’s not important. They know we know it is, and they’re doing their best to keep us away.”

“I take it their best isn’t good enough?”

The Assistant Secretary of War shook his strong-jawed head. “Not even close. We’re punishing them—that’s the only word for it. I happen to know their boss researcher went to Richmond not long ago to squall like a branded calf. I wish I would have found out sooner. I might have tried to arrange to put him out of action for good.”

“You have people in Richmond who can arrange that?” Flora asked with faint, or maybe not so faint, distaste. The Confederates made a policy of rubbing out U.S. officers they found dangerous. Turnabout was fair play, but even so…“War is a filthy business.”

“It sure is. And the only thing worse than a war is a lost war. Two of those a lifetime ago almost ruined the country forever,” Roosevelt said. “So, yes, there are people who would have tried to make sure Professor So-and-So never stood up in front of a blackboard again. No guarantees, of course, but we would have had a go at it.”

“Would killing him make that much difference to the Confederate war effort?”

“No way to be sure, but we think so. He gets almost anything he wants when it comes to money and equipment. They know how important a uranium bomb is for them. If they get it first, they can still lick us. If they don’t, we’ll knock them flat and then we’ll start kicking them.”

“
Alevai
,” Flora said. Roosevelt looked quizzical; no reason he should know Yiddish. She explained: “It means something like
hopefully
or
God willing
.”

“He’d better be willing. If He’s not, He’s as sleepy as Elijah said Baal was,” Roosevelt said. “They
need
licking, dammit. That Camp Determination turned out to be even worse than you said. I hadn’t imagined it could, but there you are. What General Dowling found would gag a maggot. It really would.”

Flora resisted the impulse to shout,
I told you so!
She had, over and over again, but it was too late to do anything about that now. Instead, she said, “It’s not the only camp they’re running. They’ve got plenty more, from east Texas to Alabama. If we can wreck the rail lines going into them, we slow the slaughter, anyhow.”

“We’re doing some of that,” Roosevelt said. “It’s not our top priority, I admit. Beating the enemy in the field is. But we’re doing what we can.” He clicked his tongue between his teeth. “With all the effort the Confederate States are putting into the camps, I think Featherston would just as soon kill off his Negroes as beat us. If that’s not insane, it’s certainly strange.”

“Depends on how you look at things,” Flora replied. “Even if they lose, the Negroes will still be gone for good. And the Freedom Party thinks it
is
good.”

“If they lose, the Freedom Party is gone for good. I don’t think they’ve figured that out yet,” Roosevelt said grimly. “If they lose, chances are the Confederate States of America are gone for good, too. I’m sure those goons haven’t figured that out yet.”

“What do we do with them?” Flora asked. “Can we occupy everything from the border of Alaska all the way to the Rio Grande?”

“Can we
not
?” Roosevelt returned, and she had no good answer for him.

“What we got from the Germans really will help us build our bomb?” she said. He was bound to be right about one thing: winning came first.

“The physicists say it will. They’re right more often than they’re wrong, seems like. They’d better be, anyhow,” Roosevelt said. “I just pray some British or French sub hasn’t carried papers like that to the Confederacy.”

“
Oy!
” That dismayed Flora into Yiddish again. “That would be terrible!”

“It sure would,” Roosevelt said. “And the Confederates have something to trade for it, too. I bet the English and the French would just love to shoot rockets way into Germany.”

“
Oy!
” Flora repeated. “What can we do about it?”

“Sink all the submersibles we can, and hope we get the one that’s packed full of secret plans,” Roosevelt answered. “And yes, I know—what are the odds? But we can’t very well tell the enemy not to help their allies. That would make them more likely to do it, not less.”

“I’m afraid you’re right,” Flora said after thinking it over. She sighed. “When we broke into Georgia, I thought the war was as good as won. But it’ll come right down to the wire, won’t it?”

“Maybe not. Maybe we’ll just knock them flat,” the Assistant Secretary of War said. “But they’ve got some rabbits they could pull out of the hat. We’ll do everything we can to steal the hat or burn it, but if they hang on to it…Last time around, we could see we’d win months before we finally did. Not so easy to be sure now. That’s not for public consumption, of course. Officially, everything’s just fine.”

“Officially, everything’s always fine. Officially, everything was fine when the Confederates were driving on Lake Erie to cut us in half,” Flora said.

“Can’t go around saying things are bad and we’re losing. People might believe us.”

“Why? They don’t believe us when we tell them everything’s just fine. By now, they must figure we lie to them all the time.” Flora listened to herself with something approaching horror. Had she really turned so cynical? She feared she had.

T
he British ambassador is here to see you, Mr. President,” Jake Featherston’s secretary announced.

“Thanks, Lulu. Send him in,” the President of the CSA said.

Lord Halifax was tall and thin, with a long bald head and a pinched mouth and jaw. He reminded Jake of a walking thermometer, bulb uppermost. No matter what he looked like, though, no denying he was one sharp bird. “Mr. President,” he murmured in an accent almost a caricature of an upper-class Englishman’s.

“Good to see you, Your Excellency.” Featherston held out his hand. Halifax shook it. His grip wasn’t the dead fish you would expect. The President waved him to a chair. “Have a seat. Glad you came through the last raid all right.”

“Our embassy has an excellent shelter. Indeed, these days the shelter
is
the embassy, more or less,” Halifax said. “The chaps who stay on, I’m afraid, draw hazardous-duty pay.”

You can’t stop the United States from bombing the crap out of your capital
. That was what he meant, even if he was too much the diplomat to come out and say it. “Yeah, well, I hear the Germans and Austrians up in Philadelphia get bonuses, too,” Jake said.
They may be hurting us, but we’re still in it
. In meetings like this, words were smoke screens, concealing what lay behind them.

“Indeed,” Halifax said, which might have meant
It could be
or, just as easily,
My ass
.

“I’m hoping your country can do more to keep the Canadians fired up against the United States,” Jake said.

“Believe me, Mr. President, we’re doing everything we can, this being in our interest as well,” Lord Halifax replied. “The naval situation in the Atlantic remaining complex, however, we cannot do as much as we would wish. And events on the Continent naturally influence other commitments of scarce resources.”

Jake had no trouble translating that into plain English. The Germans were pushing England and France back. The limeys didn’t have so much to spare for adventures on this side of the Atlantic as they’d had when things were going better closer to home.

“What the damnyankees aren’t using up there, they’re shooting at us,” Featherston said. “If we go under, they aim everything at you. How long do you think you’ll last if they do?” They had a generation earlier, and the United Kingdom didn’t last long. Chances were it wouldn’t now, either.

And Lord Halifax couldn’t shoot that one back at him. The USA could go after Britain in a big way if the CSA went under—could and would. But if Britain went down, Germany wouldn’t care about the Confederacy. The Confederate States were no threat to the Kaiser, not till they got a uranium bomb. When they did, the whole goddamn world needed to watch out.

“I said we were doing everything we could, Mr President, and I assure you I meant it most sincerely,” the British ambassador said. “We appreciate the CSA’s importance to the overall strategic picture, believe you me we do. Our task would become much more difficult if the United States was prosecuting the Atlantic war with all their energy and resources.”

You
are
tying the damnyankees down for us
. Again, Halifax’s words were pretty straightforward. He had to figure Jake could see that much for himself. And Jake could.

He leaned forward across his desk toward the limey. “Fair enough,” he said, his rasping voice and harsh, half-educated accent contrasting sharply with Halifax’s soft, elegant tones. “Now we come down to it. If you need us in the war, if you need us to lick the USA for you, why the hell won’t you tell us what all you know about uranium bombs? We’ve got our own project going—you can bet your bottom dollar on that. But if you give us a hand, it helps you and us both. Sooner we start blowing the damnyankees sky-high, the happier everybody’ll be. Except them, I mean.”

Halifax’s bony face never showed much; he would have made a dangerous poker player. But his eyebrows rose a fraction now. Maybe he hadn’t expected Jake to be so direct. If he hadn’t, he didn’t know the President of the Confederate States as well as he thought he did.

“Uranium is an extremely delicate subject,” he said at last.

“Tell me about it!” Featherston exclaimed. “Even so, you think the United States aren’t working on a bomb of their own? Suppose they get it before we do. They’ll blast Richmond off the map, and New Orleans, and Atlanta—”

“Assuming Atlanta hasn’t fallen by then,” Halifax said.

Fuck you, Charlie
. Featherston almost said it, and diplomacy be damned. At the last instant, he bit his tongue. What he did say was, “Yeah, well, suppose they knock us out of the war. Then what? How long before London goes up in smoke? About as long as it takes to get a bomb across the ocean.”

Lord Halifax looked physically ill. “The United States aren’t our only worry on that score,” he choked out.

“I know. Damn Germans started this whole mess. Somebody should’ve strangled that Einstein bastard when he was a baby.” Jake scowled. “Too late to get all hot and bothered about it now. Look, I don’t even know how far along you guys are. Maybe we’re ahead of you.”