Return Engagement (3 page)

“What do you mean?” As always when somebody bucked him, suspicion clotted Featherston’s voice.

“Goldman’s a publicist. He’s got a story he wants to tell, and he wants to shout it from the housetops,” Potter replied. “Me, I’m a spy. That’s why you put the uniform back on me.”

“That’s not why, and we both know it,” Jake said. “I put the uniform back on you because shooting you five years ago would’ve raised a stink.”

“I believe it,” Clarence Potter said cheerfully. “If you give me a rifle, though, you’ve got a pretty good chance the damnyankees’ll do it for you.”

“Don’t tempt me.” The President of the Confederate States laughed. It was not a pleasant sort of laugh. “God damn you, why won’t you ever be reasonable?”

“Mr. President, I
am
being reasonable—from my own point of view, anyway,” Potter said. “I told you: I’m a spy. The best thing that can happen to me is that the bastards on the other side don’t even remember I’m here. And Saul wants to shine a searchlight on me. No, thanks.”

“Then you jew him down to shining a flashlight on you,” Featherston said. “Whatever you don’t want to show, you don’t show, that’s all.”

“I don’t want to show anything.” Potter did his best to keep his temper. It wasn’t easy, not when everyone around him seemed willfully blind. “Don’t you understand, sir? For every one thing I show, the damnyankees are going to be sure I’m hiding half a dozen more. And the bastards will be right, too.”

“But even if you don’t show anything, the Yankees will know you’re hiding something,” Jake Featherston returned. “You reckon they don’t know we’ve got spies? They’re bastards, but they aren’t stupid bastards—you know what I’m saying? They might not have your telephone number, but they know where you work. Now you tell me, Potter—is that the truth or ain’t it?”

“Well . . . maybe,” Potter said reluctantly.

“All right, then. In that case, quit your bellyaching,” Jake said. “Let Saul take his photos and write his story. If you want to say this is your supersecret brand-new spy headquarters in Williamsburg or something, you can go ahead and do that. I don’t mind one goddamn bit. Maybe it’ll make the USA drop some bombs on that ratty old place. Nobody’d mind if they blew it to hell and gone, and they wouldn’t hurt anything we want to hold on to. How does that sound?”

Potter thought it over. He didn’t like Jake Featherston, and knew he never would. He’d had to develop considerable respect for Featherston’s driving will, but he’d never thought the President was what anybody would call smart. Smart or not, though, no denying Jake could be shrewd.

“All right, sir. New supersecret spy headquarters in Williamsburg it is,” he said. “But Goldman will have to be careful taking pictures with windows in them. Now that some of the people I boss actually work above the ground here, people who take a good look at what’s in the windows will be able to see it’s Richmond.”

“You talk to Saul about that kind of crap,” Featherston said. “He’ll take care of it. You know your business. You’d best believe he knows his.” He hung up.

So did Potter, slowly and thoughtfully. Featherston had just got him to do what he was told.
If I’d pushed it, I could have gone to the front,
the intelligence officer realized ruefully. But you didn’t push things against Jake Featherston, not when he was pushing on you. Potter knew himself to be no weakling. Featherston had imposed
his
will even so.

A young lieutenant came in and dropped eight or ten envelopes on Potter’s desk. “These just came in, sir,” he said. “Not likely we’ll be getting any more like ’em.”

“No, not likely,” Potter agreed. The envelopes were from his agents in the USA, and they’d gone to mail drops in the CSA—mail sent directly to the War Department in Richmond might have made U.S. postal clerks just a trifle curious. All of them were postmarked in the last few days before the war broke out. Potter opened one from Columbus, Ohio. “Well, let’s see what we’ve got.”

The agent in Columbus played the role of a businessman. He played it so well, he was getting rich up there in the United States. He’d acquired a Packard and a mistress. While Potter knew about the latter, he didn’t think the man’s wife in Jacksonville did.

Codes were crude. The agent wrote that his competition was alert, that the other fellows were sending salesmen down into towns close by the Ohio River, and that they’d ordered more heavy machinery. Potter didn’t have to be a genius to figure out that salesmen were soldiers and heavy machinery meant barrels. Neither would any other reasonably suspicious fellow who happened to read the letter.

But if you weren’t suspicious, it looked like an ordinary business letter. So did the others. They all told about the same story: the damnyankees knew something was coming, and they were getting ready to try to stop it.

Clarence Potter muttered to himself. Had he been running things, he wouldn’t have been so belligerent ahead of time. That way, the attack might have been a strategic as well as a tactical surprise. But he didn’t run things. For better and for worse, this was and would be Jake Featherston’s show.

J
efferson Pinkard slept badly. In part, that was because the weather at Camp Dependable—not far outside Alexandria, Louisiana—was even hotter and muggier than it was in Birmingham, where he’d lived most of his life. And in part . . . He mostly didn’t remember his dreams, even when they woke him up with his heart pounding and his eyes wide and staring. Considering the kind of dreams a camp commandant was likely to have, that made him more lucky than not.

Camp Dependable wasn’t desperately crowded any more. The camp had a limited capacity. The number of black prisoners who came into it from all over the CSA seemed unlimited. Rebellion had smoldered and now and then burst into flame ever since the Freedom Party came to power—and Jake Featherston and his followers didn’t believe in turning the other cheek. When they got hit, they hit back—hard.

When a new shipment of captured rebels came into the camp, guards led a matching number of prisoners out to the nearby woods and swamps. The guards always came back. The prisoners they escorted didn’t.

The first time Jeff had to order something like that, he’d been appalled. He’d had to do it several times now, and it did grow easier. You could get used to damn near anything. He’d seen that in west Texas during the war, and again in the civil war down in Mexico. But, even though he didn’t break out in palpitations whenever he had to do it again, it told on him when he went to bed at night.

It told on the guards, too, or on some of them, anyhow. The ones who went out on those disposal jobs often drank like fishes. Pinkard couldn’t clamp down on them as hard as he would have liked. He knew what they were doing out there. They needed some way to blow off steam. One of them, the very first time, had stuck his pistol in his mouth and blown off the top of his head instead.

Others, though, didn’t seem bothered at all. They came back to camp laughing and joking. Some took it as all in a day’s work. And some took it as the best sport this side of coon hunting. When Jeff said as much after the latest operation, one of those fellows grinned at him and said, “Hell, it is coon hunting, ain’t it?”

“Funny, Edwards. Funny like a goddamn crutch,” Pinkard had answered. But a lot of the returning guards thought it was the funniest thing they’d heard in all their born days. Pinkard said, “All right, you bastards. Go ahead and laugh. But you better not be laughing and screwing around when you’re watching the niggers. You’ll be sorry if you are, by Jesus.”

That got their attention.
By God, it had better,
Jeff thought. Camp Dependable didn’t hold political prisoners any more (well, except for Willy Knight, and the ex–Vice President was a special case if ever there was one). These days, the prisoners were Negroes who’d fought against the Confederate States. If they saw a chance, they would rise up against the guards in a heartbeat.

Pinkard’s gaze went to the machine-gun towers rising above the barbed-wire perimeter of the camp. If the spooks in here did try to get cute, they’d pay for it. Of course, they were going to pay for it anyway, so what did they have to lose? Guarding desperate men had its disadvantages.

Some of the guards in the towers were men who had the toughest time going out on population-reduction maneuvers. (Jeff wanted to think about what he did with the Negroes who left the camp and didn’t come back in terms like those. That way, he didn’t have to dwell on the details of what went on out there in the woods and swamps. He had his weaknesses, too.) Even so, he didn’t worry about them where they were. If it came down to their necks or those of the prisoners, he knew they’d save themselves.

“Keep your eyes open,” he urged for what had to be the millionth time. “Keep your ears open, too. Don’t let those sneaky black bastards tell you what they want you to hear.” He looked around. “Any questions?”

The guards shook their heads. Pinkard, who was an ordinary Joe himself, knew a lot of them weren’t any too bright. It didn’t matter, as long as they were tough and as long as they followed orders. They were more than tough enough. And they obeyed pretty well. If nothing else, the fear of disaster kept them in line.

He nodded. “All right, then. Dismissed.”

Off they went. Mercer Scott, the guard chief, stayed behind to talk privately to Pinkard. Scott was plenty sharp, or sly anyway, and about as tough as they came. His jowly face looked as if it were made out of boot leather. Pausing to shift his chaw from one cheek to the other, he said, “Boss, we got to do a better job of what we’re doin’.”

“Yeah?” Jeff said noncommittally. He worried that Scott was after his job. He also worried that the guard chief told tales on him back to Richmond. Jake Featherston (or Attorney General Ferd Koenig, which amounted to the same thing) kept an eye on everybody. Pinkard had been in the Freedom Party since the first time he heard Featherston speak, and he’d stayed in it through good times and bad.
You’d think they’d cut me a little slack.
But that wasn’t how things worked, and he knew it.

Mercer Scott nodded now. “Yeah, I reckon so. Taking a batch of niggers out and shooting ’em . . . That wears on the men when they got to do it over and over, you know what I mean?”

“Well, we wouldn’t have to do it if Richmond didn’t keep sending us more smokes than we got any chance of holding, let alone feeding,” Jeff said. “If you’ve got any clout back there, make ’em stop.”

There. Now he’d told Scott at least some of what he suspected. But the guard chief shook his bullet head. “Not me. Not the way you mean. I don’t believe I’ve got as much as you.”

Was he sandbagging? Pinkard wouldn’t have been surprised. He said, “Well, what the hell are we supposed to do? We’ve got to get rid of the extra niggers, on account of the camp sure as shit won’t hold as many as they send us. Got to keep the goddamn population down.” No, he didn’t like talking—or thinking—about shooting people. That Mercer Scott didn’t seem to mind only made him ruder and cruder than ever in Pinkard’s eye.

Now he said, “Yeah, boss, we got to get rid of ’em, but shooting ’em ain’t the answer. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

Pinkard began to lose patience. “You’re telling me you don’t like it, so—”

“It ain’t just me,” Scott broke in. “It’s the men, too. This here business is hard on ’em, way we’re doing it now. Some can take it, yeah, but some can’t. I got me a ton of transfer requests I’m sitting on. And folks around this place know what we’re doing, too—whites and niggers. You hear all those guns goin’off every so often, nobody needs to draw you a picture after that.”

“Fine,” Jeff said. “Fuckin’ wonderful. I told you, Mercer, I know what you’ve got your ass in an uproar about. You tell me what sort of notion you’ve got for fixing it, then I’ll know whether we can try it or we need to keep on doin’ what we’re doin’ undisirregardless of whether anybody likes it. So piss or get off the pot, is what I’m telling you.”

That got him a sullen look from the guard chief. “It’s your camp, dammit. You’re the one who’s supposed to keep it running smooth.”

“You mean you don’t know what to do,” Jeff said scornfully. “Get the hell out of here.”

“Oh, I’ll go.” But Scott turned back over his shoulder to add, “I’m telling you, boss, there’s got to be a better way.”

“Maybe there does,” Pinkard said. “You figure out what it is, you let me know. Till then, you got to shut up and do your job just like the rest of us.”

Black prisoners—Willy Knight a white crow among them—lined up to get their noon rations. Those rations, even now, were none too large. They’d never caught up with the capacity of Camp Dependable. If Pinkard hadn’t carried out periodic population reductions, he wouldn’t have been able to feed the population he had. That would have reduced it, too, but not neatly or efficiently.

The blacks sent Pinkard looks in which hate mingled with fear. They knew what he was doing to them. They couldn’t help knowing. But they were warier about showing their hatred than they had been. Anything that put them on the wrong side of any guard was liable to get them included in one of the reductions. If that happened, they’d die quickly instead of slowly.

Pinkard went into the dining area and watched them gulp down their soup—cooked up from whatever might be edible that the camp got its hands on—and grits. The food disappeared amazingly fast. Even so, there was never enough. Day after day, prisoners got scrawnier. Less and less flesh held their skin away from their bones.

One of them nodded to Pinkard. “You give me a gun, suh,” he said. “You give me a gun and I shoots me plenty o’ damnyankees. Give me a gun and give me a uniform and give me some food. I be the best goddamn sojer anybody ever see.”

Maybe he would. He’d fought against the Confederate States. Why not for them? Sometimes a fellow who’d learned what to do with a rifle in his hands didn’t care in which direction he pointed it. Jeff had been that way himself when he went down to Mexico. The only reason he’d fought for Maximilian and not the republican rebels was that his buddies were on the Emperor’s side. He’d cared nothing for the cause as a cause.