Return Engagement (40 page)

If Smith could be suckered on a deal like that, couldn’t he also be suckered into leaving himself open for the next punch Jake Featherston planned to throw? Jake didn’t see why not. The Yankees needed one more licking after this one, maybe even two, before they’d roll over and play dead for a good long time, the way they had after the War of Secession and the Second Mexican War. And Smith was dumb enough and weak enough—ballsless enough—to cave in one more time. Jake was so sure . . . “Bet you a stonewall,” he said.

“Sir?” Goldman said.

“Five dollars in gold says Al Smith caves.”

The communications director shook his head. “I wouldn’t bet against you, Mr. President. You’ve shown you know what you’re doing. I hope you’re right again.”

He wasn’t saying that for the sake of flattery. More than most people around Jake, he spoke his mind. And Featherston didn’t think he declined the bet because he was a cheap Jew, either. That was a measure of the respect Jake had for Goldman. The other man had turned it down because he’d thought he would lose, which was a hell of a good reason to turn down a bet.

“I reckon I am.” Jake generally thought he was right, and he generally
was
right. He’d proved it again and again, in the Freedom Party’s rise and in the way things had gone since he took the oath of office.

He was on his way back to the Gray House through the blacked-out streets of Richmond when air-raid sirens began to scream. The racket penetrated even the bulletproof glass of his armored limousine. So did the harsh, flat
crump
s of exploding Yankee bombs a few minutes later.

“You want me to find a shelter for you, Mr. President?” the driver asked.

The man was a Freedom Party guard. He was as tough as they came. He wasn’t worried about his own neck, only about Featherston’s safety. Jake knew that. All the same, he wished Willy Knight’s hired guns hadn’t done in Virgil Joyner. His old driver hadn’t just taken care of him. He’d
known
him, as much as any man could.

Jake had to answer this fellow. “Hell, no, Mike,” he said. “Keep going—that’s all. We’ll be back pretty damn quick, and this here auto can take anything but a direct hit.”

“All right, sir.” The driver’s broad shoulders moved up and down in a shrug. “Reckoned I better ask. You suppose this raid is the damnyankees’ answer to you?”

That was a different question, and a different kind of question. After a moment’s thought, Featherston shook his head and said, “No, I don’t believe so. They’ll need a while to think about it. This here is nothing but business as usual.”

He did go to the shelter when he got to the Presidential residence. He didn’t want to; he would rather have stayed out and watched the show. But he knew he had to keep himself safe. Nobody else was up to the job of leading the CSA against the USA—nobody came close. The Yankees stayed over Richmond for close to two hours. Not all their bombs hit targets worth hitting, but the Confederates had the same problem when they bombed U.S. cities. Featherston still hoped Al Smith would say yes to him. The USA hadn’t gone away yet, though.

C
larence Potter listened to U.S. wireless broadcasts. Had he been just anybody in the CSA, he might have got in trouble for that. But rank had its privileges. So did belonging to Intelligence. He needed to know what the enemy was saying.

Finding out wasn’t always easy. The CSA and the USA jammed each other’s stations. Very often, in places as close to the border as Richmond, you got nothing but howls of static as you spun the dial.

As usual, though, patience paid off. So did a wireless set a good deal more sensitive than the ones ordinary Confederates could buy. Potter brought in a Philadelphia station that broadcast President Smith’s response to President Featherston’s call for an end to the fighting.

Smith wasn’t half—wasn’t a quarter—the speaker Featherston was. All the same, he left no doubt about where he stood. Through buzzes and hisses and pops, he said, “The United States have lost a battle. We have not lost the war. As John Paul Jones said when the British called on him to surrender,, ‘I have not yet begun to fight!’ By treacherously attacking after loudly pledging peace, the Confederate States have gained an early advantage. I cannot deny that. I cannot conceal it. I do not intend to try. But we are still in the fight. We will stay in the fight. And wars are not decided by who starts ahead, but by who wins in the end. In the Great War, the CSA occupied Washington and threatened Philadelphia. We won even so. We can win again. We will win again. Jake Featherston has shown he is a man who cannot be trusted even when he sounds most reasonable. He has shown he cannot be trusted
especially
when he sounds most reasonable. We will not disarm. We will not open our borders to future aggression. This war is not over. The Confederate States started it. We will finish it. Good day.”

“Shit,” Clarence Potter said, and turned off the wireless. Al Smith had been slow figuring out his Confederate opponent, but he had Jake Featherston down cold now. And if the United States wouldn’t curl up and die just because they’d taken a hard right to the chops, the Confederate States would have to knock them flat. Could they?

We’re going to find out,
Potter thought unhappily. Standing toe to toe with a bigger foe and trading punches till one side couldn’t stand up any more hadn’t worked during the Great War. Would it this time?

Potter shrugged. The Confederate States were better at knocking things flat than they had been a generation earlier. Unfortunately, so were the United States. The attack on Richmond the night before had been one of the worst of the war. Confederate antiaircraft gunners had fired away like madmen. Searchlights had swung through the sky. Fighters had searched the blackness for the U.S. bombers tormenting their city. But only a handful of Yankee airplanes had gone down.

The North American air war struck Potter as a duel with machine guns at a pace and a half. The CSA and USA faced each other across a long, long border. When they started smashing up each other’s cities, they could hardly miss. The Confederates had got off to a better start. They’d begun gearing up for the war before their enemies had, and they’d begun with the advantage of surprise.

But the damnyankees hadn’t thrown up their hands or thrown in the sponge. That they would try to ride out the CSA’s first blows, stay in the war, and use their greater numbers and strength had always been Potter’s worst fear. Placed where he was, he thought he understood the USA better than most of his countrymen (including Jake Featherston) did. He looked like he was right, too. That worried him.

The United States were still cut in half. Potter nodded to himself—that would help a lot. Even the biggest body still needed food. If the factories in the Northeast couldn’t get the raw materials they had to have, they couldn’t make guns and shells for all the millions of U.S. soldiers to shoot at their Confederate counterparts. And if the USA’s soldiers couldn’t shoot, what difference did it make how many of them there were? They’d lose any which way.

If I were a Yankee logistics officer, what would I be doing now?
Potter wondered. He had a pretty good idea. He’d be seeing what he could get aboard freighters on the Great Lakes, and he’d be seeing how much the Canadian railroad lines north of Lake Superior could carry and how fast he could bump up their capacity.

And would all that add up to anything that could replace the rail lines and highways the Confederacy had cut? Not a chance in church. Potter didn’t need to be a logistics officer to know that much. Would it add up to enough to keep the United States breathing? That was a harder question, and one for which he didn’t have the answer. Neither did anybody else in the Confederate States. In one sense, that was why people fought wars: to find out such things.

Lost in calculations—and even more lost because he didn’t have all the information he needed to make them—Potter jumped a little when the telephone rang. “Intelligence—Potter speaking,” he said into the mouthpiece; no one on the other end of the line would know he’d been startled.

“Hello, Potter, you sly son of a bitch.” That was Jake Featherston’s perpetually angry rasp.

“Good morning, Mr. President. To what do I owe the honor of this call?” Potter, on the other hand, was perpetually ironic, or near enough to make no difference: an asset for an Intelligence officer.

Featherston went on, “You’re laughing your ass off, aren’t you, on account of you figured the United States’d keep fighting and most folks here didn’t? I didn’t myself, and that’s a fact. I reckoned Al Smith’d see reason.” He sounded angry that Smith hadn’t, too.

Of course, what he called reason meant
what Jake Featherston wants.
Featherston didn’t, couldn’t, see that. And Al Smith finally saw it clearly. Potter said, “Sir, I’m not laughing. There’s nothing funny about it. I wish the United States had rolled over and played dead, believe you me I do.”

“Well, if they won’t roll over, we goddamn well have to
roll
’em over,” Featherston said. He didn’t quit when things failed to go the way he wanted them to. That was one of the things that made him so dangerous—and so successful.

“Yes, sir.” Potter had a good deal of stubbornness in his system, too. He didn’t like admitting, even to himself, that the President of the CSA had more. But he knew it was true, however little he liked it. “What can I do for you now? Besides not gloating, I mean?”

After a couple of seconds of surprised silence, Featherston offered him an anatomically unlikely suggestion. Then the President of the CSA laughed. “You’ve got your nerve, don’t you?” He sounded more admiring than otherwise. “We’ve got to keep the damnyankees hopping, is what we’ve got to do. What sort of ways can you pump up those Mormon maniacs in Utah?”

“It would be easier if you hadn’t offered them to the USA on a platter,” Potter said dryly.

“Potter, it doesn’t matter for hell—not for hell, you hear me?” Featherston said. “If the Devil could get those sorry sons of bitches guns, they’d take ’em and they wouldn’t say boo. You gonna tell me I’m wrong about that?”

“Not me,” Clarence Potter said, and he meant it. “The Mormons love the USA about as much as our niggers love the Freedom Party.”

“Yeah.” For once, Featherston sounded not only unhappy but also unsure of himself. He rarely hesitated, but he did now. At last, he went on, “Goddamn Yankees know about that, too. They use it to give our nuts a twist whenever they can. That one’s a bitch to get a handle on.”

One way to reduce the problem would have been to give Negroes in the CSA privileges to match those of whites. The Whigs had taken tentative steps in that direction during the Great War—they’d granted Confederate citizenship, as opposed to mere residence, to colored men who honorably completed a term of service in the C.S. Army. Potter had never thought that was a smart idea. What had it done but given a large cadre of Negroes training in how to shoot white men and the certain knowledge that they could?

He said, “The harder we press the United States on their home grounds, the harder the time they’ll have poking us down here.”

“That’s how I figure it, too,” Featherston said. “The best defense is giving the other bastard a good kick in the teeth before he gets his dukes up.” If that wasn’t Jake Featherston to the core, Potter had never heard anything that would be. Like a lot of things Featherston said, it held its share of truth. Also like a lot of things the President said, it wasn’t so simple as he made it out to be.

“Even if Smith did say no, we’re off to a pretty good start on that,” Potter said.

“You bet we are,” Featherston said, though he still sounded furious that the President of the USA hadn’t done as he’d hoped. “Reason I called you, though—along with the Mormon business, I should say—is that I want your people to step up sabotage east of what we’re holding in Ohio. The United States are building up to try and cut off the base of our salient, and I want ’em to have all the trouble they can handle doing it—all they can handle and then some.”

“I’ll take care of it, Mr. President,” Potter said. That was his bailiwick, all right. “Do you have anything in particular in mind, or just general mischief?”

“Always general mischief,” Featherston answered, “but not just general mischief. If nasty things happen to bridges strong enough to take barrels, the Yankees’ll have a harder time coming at us, and that’s what I’ve got in mind.”

“Yes, sir,” Potter said crisply, even though he couldn’t help adding, “Bombing will help, too.”

Jake Featherston had a nasty laugh most of the time. He sure did now. “Don’t teach your granny to suck eggs. Trouble is, the high-level bombers are good for tearing hell out of a city, but the only way they can hit a bridge is fool luck. Our airplane and bombsight makers kind of sold us a bill of goods on that one.”

“Looks like the USA’s people sold them the same bill of goods,” Potter remarked.

“Yeah, you got that right. Those high-forehead types are the same wherever you find ’em.” With one casual sentence, Featherston dismissed scientists and intellectuals. He went on without even noticing what he’d done: “Mules, now, Mules can hit bridges they aim at. But the damnyankees have got antiaircraft guns coming out of their assholes, and Asskickers turn out to be sitting ducks when the other guy’s waiting for them. We’ve lost more airplanes and more pilots than we can afford. So . . . sabotage where we can.”

Again, that made sense. Featherston, after all, had spent three years in combat in the Great War. He’d been in at the start, and he’d still been shooting at the Yankees when the Confederacy finally threw in the sponge. When he talked about the battlefield, he knew what he was talking about.

“Sabotage where we can,” Potter agreed. “I’ll see who’s in place in that area—and then we’ll find out who talks a good game and who’s serious about this business.”

“Fair-weather friends,” Featherston fleered.

“It happens, sir,” Potter said. “Happens all the time, in fact. Some people just talk about helping us. Some will pass information, but that’s all. Some, though, some
will
put their necks on the line.”