Return Engagement (35 page)

Henderson V. FitzBelmont coughed. “In fact, Mr. President, it’s about one part in a hundred and forty.”

“Oh.” Now Jake frowned. “That doesn’t sound so real good. How do you go about separating it out, then?”

The professor also frowned, unhappily. “There is, as yet, no proven method. We cannot do it chemically; we know that. Chemically, the two isotopes are identical, as any isotopes are. We need to find some physical way to capitalize on their difference in weight. A centrifuge might do part of the job. Gaseous diffusion might, too, if we can find the right kind of gas. The only candidate that seems to be available at present is uranium hexafluoride. It is, ah, difficult to work with.”

“How do you mean?” Featherston inquired.

“It is highly corrosive and highly toxic.”

“Oh,” Jake said again. “So you’d need to do a lot of experimenting before you even have a prayer of making this work?” Professor FitzBelmont nodded. Jake went on, “How much would it cost? How much manpower would it take? There’s a war on, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I had, Mr. President. I had indeed,” FitzBelmont said. “I confess, it would not be cheap. It would not be easy. It would not be quick. It would require a very considerable industrial effort. I do not minimize the difficulties. They are formidable. But if they can be overcome, you have a weapon that will win the war.”

Jake Featherston had heard that song before. Crackpot inventors sang it every day. Professor FitzBelmont didn’t seem like the worst kind of crackpot, the kind with an obviously unworkable scheme for which he wanted millions of dollars—all of them in his own personal bank account.
That
kind of crackpot always said things would be easy as pie. Sometimes he knew he was lying, sometimes he didn’t.

Because FitzBelmont seemed basically honest, Jake let him down as easy as he could. “If you’d come to me with this here idea six years ago, Professor, I might have been able to do something for you.”

“Six years ago, sir, no one in the world had the slightest idea this was possible,” FitzBelmont said. “Word of the essential experiment was published in a German journal about eighteen months ago.”

“Fine. Have it your way. But you don’t see the point,” Featherston said. “The point is, right now we
are
in the middle of a war. We’re stretched thin. We’re stretched thin as can be, matter of fact. I can’t take away God knows how much manpower and God knows how much money and throw all that down a rathole that won’t pay off for years and may not pay off at all. You see what I’m saying?”

Professor FitzBelmont nodded stiffly. “Yes, sir, I do understand that. But I remain convinced the benefits of success would outweigh all these costs.”

Of course you do. You wouldn’t be here bending my ear if you didn’t,
Jake thought.
But that doesn’t mean you’re right.
He stayed polite. One of the drawbacks of being President, he’d discovered, was that you couldn’t always call a damn fool a damn fool to his face. Sometimes, no matter how big a damn fool he was, you knew you might need him again one of these days.

After he’d shown Professor FitzBelmont the door, Jake let out a sigh. For a moment, the man had had him going. If you could take out a whole city with just one bomb, that would really be something. It sure would—if you could. But odds were you couldn’t, and never would be able to. Odds were the professor wanted the Confederate government to pay for a research project he couldn’t afford any other way. Odds were nothing but a few papers with FitzBelmont’s name on them would ever come out of the research project. Since becoming President, Jake had become wise in the ways of professors. He’d had to.

He lit a cigarette, sucked in smoke, and blew a wistful cloud at the ceiling. It was too goddamn bad, though.

Distant thunder muttered, off to the north. Jake’s lips tightened on the cigarette. The day was fine and clear. Oh, it was hot and muggy, but it was always going to be hot and muggy in Richmond this time of year. It wasn’t thunder. It was the artillery duel that went on between Yankee and Confederate forces. If the United States had wanted to drive for Richmond the way the Confederates had driven for Lake Erie, the Confederate defenders would have had a bastard of a time holding them back.

It hadn’t happened, though, and defenses at the river lines grew stronger every day. A thrust the damnyankees could have easily made a month before would cost them dear now. In another few weeks, it would—Jake hoped—be impossible.

He walked over to his desk and stubbed out the cigarette. Somewhere in the pile of papers was one Clarence Potter had sent him. Where the devil had that disappeared to? He reached into the stack and, like Little Jack Horner pulling out a plum, came up with the document he needed. The desk always looked like hell. It was Lulu’s despair. But he could find things when he needed to.

From what Potter said—and, Featherston remembered, General Patton agreed—the USA’s most aggressive officer who was worth anything was a barrel commander named Morrell. Jake grinned. He thought he’d remembered the name, and he was right. If the fellow had been in charge in northern Virginia, he could have raised all kinds of Cain. But he was busy over in Ohio, playing defense instead of getting the chance to attack. That suited Featherston—to say nothing of the Confederate cause—down to the ground.

The United States made most of their barrels in Michigan. It made sense that they should. That was where their motorcar industry had grown up. But with a corridor from the Ohio River to Lake Erie in Confederate hands, how were they going to get those barrels to the East? And if they couldn’t, what would happen when the Confederate States hit them again?

“Yeah,” Jake said softly. “What will happen then?” His grin got wider. He had his own ideas about that. Al Smith probably wouldn’t like them very much, but Jake didn’t give a damn about what Al Smith liked or didn’t like. He’d pried the plebiscite out of the President of the USA. He would have fought without it, but the odds wouldn’t have been so good. Getting what the Yankees called Houston back was nice. Getting Kentucky back was essential. Kentucky was the key to everything.

And he had it, and the key was turning in the lock.

L
ike anyone else who got a halfway decent education in the Confederate States before the Great War, Tom Colleton had fought his way through several years of ancient Greek. He didn’t remember a hell of a lot of it any more, but one passage had stuck in his head forever. In Xenophon’s
Anabasis,
the Greek mercenaries who’d backed the wrong candidate in a Persian civil war had had to fight their way out of the Persian Empire. They’d come up over a rise, looked north, and started yelling,
“Thalatta! Thalatta!”
—”The sea! The sea!” Once they reached the sea, they knew they could get home again.

Looking north toward the gray-blue waters of Lake Erie, Tom felt like shouting,
“Thalatta! Thalatta!”
himself. As Xenophon’s Greeks had more than 2,300 years earlier, he’d come in sight of his goal. He still intended to jump in the lake when he got the chance.

Now he had to get there, and to get there without throwing away too many of his men. Sandusky sprawled along the southern shore of Lake Erie. It was about five miles wide and two miles deep. Not far from the water was Roosevelt Park—it had been Washington Park till the United States decided they would rather not remember a man from Virginia. The factories and foundries lay south of town. The business district—brick buildings that had gone up between the War of Secession and the turn of the century—lay to the north. The whole damn town crawled with U.S. soldiers. Trains were still trying to get through, even though Confederate gunners had the tracks in their sights.

As Tom watched, a steam engine hauled a long train toward the town from the west. What was it carrying? Men? Barrels? Ammunition? All three? Artillery opened up on it right away. The engineer had nerve—either that or an officer was standing behind him with a gun to his head. He kept coming.

He kept coming, in fact, after two or three shells hit the passenger cars and flatcars he was hauling. Not till an antibarrel round of armor-piercing shot went right through his boiler did he stop, and that halt wasn’t voluntary on his part.

Sure as hell, soldiers in green-gray started spilling out of the passenger cars. Artillery bursts and machine-gun fire took their toll among them, but the Yankees mostly got away. By how the survivors dove for whatever cover they could find, they’d been under fire before. Tom Colleton felt a certain abstract sympathy for them. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been under fire himself.

Then the damnyankees did something he thought was downright brilliant. He would have admired it even more if it hadn’t almost cost him his neck. Despite bullets striking home close by, the U.S. soldiers managed to get a handful of barrels off the train and send them rattling and clanking against the advancing Confederates.

All by themselves, those barrels almost turned advance into retreat for the CSA. One driver plainly knew what he was doing; either he was a real barrel man or he’d driven a bulldozer or a big harvester in civilian life. The others were far more erratic, learning as they went along. The Yankees at the machine guns and cannon had more enthusiasm than precision. As long as they kept shooting, they made it almost impossible for Confederate infantry to get anywhere near them. And they shot up the crews of some of the guns that had been punishing the U.S. soldiers from the train.

An antibarrel round set one of the snorting horrors on fire. A brave Confederate flung a grenade into an open hatch on another—the U.S. soldiers manning the barrel hadn’t known enough to slam it shut. That machine blew up; Tom didn’t think anybody got out of it. A third barrel bogged down in an enormous bomb crater. The amateur driver couldn’t figure out how to escape. That limited the damage that machine could do.

But the last one, the one with the driver who wasn’t an amateur, kept on coming. The antibarrel cannon that had put paid to the first U.S. machine scored a hit, but a hit at a bad angle—the round glanced off instead of penetrating. Then machine-gun fire from the mechanical monster drove off the cannon’s crew. And then, in an act of bravado that made Tom Colleton clap his hands in startled admiration, the barrel drove right over the gun. Nobody would use that weapon again soon.

Without infantry support, though, a lone barrel was vulnerable. Confederate soldiers sneaked around behind it and flung grenades at the engine decking till—after what seemed like forever—the barrel finally caught fire. They showed their respect for the men who’d formed the makeshift crew by taking them prisoner instead of shooting them down when they bailed out of the burning barrel.

Tom Colleton looked at his wristwatch. To his amazement, that hour’s worth of action had been crammed into fifteen minutes of real life. He turned to a man standing close by him. “Well,” he said brightly, “
that
was fun.”

“Uh, yes, sir,” the young lieutenant answered.

“Now we have to make up for lost time.” Tom pointed toward downtown Sandusky. “Any bright ideas?”

The lieutenant considered, then asked what had become the inevitable question in the Ohio campaign: “Where are
our
barrels?”

“I think I’d better find out,” Tom said. He didn’t want to send infantry forward without armor—he was sure of that. If U.S. soldiers felt like fighting house-to-house, his regiment would melt like snow in springtime. He looked for outflanking routes, and didn’t see any the damnyankees hadn’t covered. With a sigh, he shouted for the man with a wireless set on his back.

Ten minutes of shouting into the mouthpiece at a colonel of barrels named Lee Castle showed him the armor wasn’t that eager to get involved in house-to-house fighting, either. “That’s not what we do,” Castle said. “Place like that, they could tear us a new asshole, and for what? Sorry, pal, but it’s not worth the price.”

“What are you good for, then?” Tom knew that wasn’t fair, but his frustration had to come out somewhere.

“I’m doing this the way I’m doing it on orders from General Patton,” Colonel Castle said, and he might have been quoting Holy Writ. “You don’t like it, take it up with him—either that, or bend the flyboys’ ears.”

Tom doubted Patton would bend. He could see why the commander of armor would want to keep his machines from being devoured while clearing a few blocks of houses and factories. He didn’t like it, but he could see it. Calling in the bombers to soften up Sandusky was a happier thought. It wasn’t as if the town hadn’t been hit before. But now it would get hit with a purpose.

A couple of hours later, bombs rained down on Sandusky from a flight of Razorback bombers that droned along a couple of miles up in the sky. Their bombsights were supposed to be so fancy, they were military secrets. That didn’t particularly impress Tom, not when some of the bombs came down on his men instead of inside enemy lines. He lost two dead and five wounded, and shook his fist at the sky as the bombers flew south toward the field from which they’d taken off.

But then the Mules started hammering Sandusky. The dive bombers screamed down to what seemed just above rooftop height before releasing their bombs and pulling up again. Their machine guns blazed; their sirens made them sound even more demoralizing than they would have otherwise. What they hit stayed hit. No wonder the soldiers on the ground called them Asskickers.

No matter how hard they hit, though, they couldn’t work miracles. When Confederate troops poked forward after the Mules flew away, machine guns and mortars and rifles greeted them. Bombers could change a town from houses to ruins, but that didn’t mean stubborn soldiers wouldn’t keep fighting in those ruins. And ruins, as Tom had discovered, sometimes offered better cover than houses did.

Try as they would, his men couldn’t clear the U.S. soldiers from one factory. By the sign painted on the side of its dingy brick walls, it had manufactured crayons. Now it turned out trouble, and in carload lots, too. It was too big and too well sited to bypass; it had to fall before the rest of Sandusky could.