Return Engagement (58 page)

“Yes. On the other hand.” Dowling left it there, too. He hadn’t thought much of what he’d heard of MacArthur’s plans. He didn’t think Colonel Abell had, either.
Do I really want this assignment? Am I sure I do?
But he did, and he was. Anything was better than sitting here counting raindrops. “I’ll do my best. Can you get me a copy of the plan? I’ll want to be as familiar as I can with what I’m supposed to do by the time I get down to the border. The attack should begin soon.” The attack should have begun a while ago, but he didn’t mention that. All the rain that had fallen lately wouldn’t make things any easier.

“I’m sorry. I should have brought one with me, but I wanted to make sure you would say yes first,” Abell said. “I’ll have a runner get you one right away. How soon do you plan on going down to the border?”

“As soon as I can throw a change of clothes into a duffel bag—sooner, if they need me there right away,” Dowling answered.

“I’ll put a motorcar at your disposal,” Abell said. “It will have a civilian paint job—nothing to draw special notice from the air.”

“Thanks,” Dowling said, and then, in a different tone of voice, “Thanks. I’ll do everything I can.” Colonel Abell nodded, saluted, and left.

Two hours later, Dowling was rolling south in a middle-aged Ford that was indeed thoroughly ordinary. He paid little attention to the landscape. He did notice bomb damage dropped off sharply once the motorcar got out of Philadelphia. It didn’t pick up again till the Ford went through Wilmington, Delaware.

For the most part, though, he found the three-ring binder spread out on his ample lap much more interesting than the countryside. Daniel MacArthur—or rather, the clever young officers on his staff—had planned everything down to the last paper clip. MacArthur knew exactly what he wanted the First Corps to do. If everything went according to Hoyle, it could handle the job, too.

If. As usual, the word was the joker in the deck. One of the few things Dowling found inadequate in the enormous plan was its appreciation of Confederate strength. MacArthur’s attitude seemed to be that the men he commanded would brush aside whatever enemy soldiers they happened to run into, march into Richmond, and hold a victory parade past the Confederate White House and Confederate Capitol.

Maybe things would work out that way. Every once in a while, they did. If the Confederate thrust through Ohio hadn’t gone according to plan, Dowling would have been amazed. He shifted in the back seat. He’d been on the receiving end of that plan. Getting his own back would be sweet . . . if he could.

“You all right, sir?” the driver asked. He must have seen Dowling fidget in the rearview mirror.

“Yes.” Dowling hoped he meant it.

The sun started to sink below the horizon as they passed from Delaware to Maryland. Dowling held the plan ever closer to his nose so he could go on studying it. One other thing that seemed to be missing from it was any notion of how bad weather would affect it. Listening to rain drum on the roof of the Ford, Dowling found the omission unfortunate. The driver turned on the slit headlights that were all anyone could use these days. They were inadequate in good weather, and almost completely useless in this storm. The motorcar slowed to a crawl. Dowling hoped other drivers would have the sense to slow to a crawl, too. Every so often, he got glimpses of wreckage hauled off to the side of the road. He could have thought of lots of things that would have done more for his confidence in the good habits of other drivers.

Outside of Baltimore, the Ford stopped crawling. That didn’t mean it sped up: it stopped moving at all. “What the hell?” Dowling said irritably, wondering if Abell shouldn’t have laid an airplane on for him instead.

“Some kind of mess up ahead. We’ll find out when we get there.” The driver sounded philosophical.

That did little to ease Dowling’s irritation. “If we get there, you mean,” he growled. There was barely enough light to let him see the driver’s shoulders go up and down in a shrug.

They took twenty minutes to go half a mile to the trouble. A bomb crater rendered the road impassable south- and northbound. Engineers had just finished spreading steel matting of the sort that made instant airstrips out to either side of the damage. Without it, motorcars would have bogged down in the mud when they went off the road and onto the shoulder. With it, Dowling felt as if he were being shaken to pieces. He breathed a sigh of relief when the Ford got on the road again.

The relief didn’t last. No sooner had they got into Baltimore than the Confederates started bombing it. With that cloud cover overhead, the enemy bombers couldn’t hope to be accurate. But they didn’t seem to care. The bombs would come down somewhere on U.S. soil. If they didn’t blow up ships in the harbor or factories or warehouses, they’d flatten shops or apartments or houses. And if they hit a school or a hospital or a church—well, that was just one of those things. U.S. pilots didn’t lose sleep over it, either.

Cops and civil-defense wardens were shouting for everybody to get off the streets. “Keep going,” Dowling told the driver. The man shrugged again and obeyed.

Somewhere near the middle of town, a warden stepped in front of the Ford. He almost got himself run over for his trouble. “Are you out of your frigging mind?” he yelled as a bomb crashed down a few hundred yards away. “Get into a cellar, or the undertaker will bury you in a jam tin.”

“What do we do, sir?” the driver asked Dowling. “Your call.”

Before Dowling could answer, a bomb went off much closer than the one a minute before. A fragment of casing clanged into the Ford’s trunk. Another pierced the left front tire, which made the auto list. And another got the civil-defense warden, who howled and went down in the middle of the wet street.

“I think we just had our minds made up for us,” Dowling said as he opened the door. “Let’s give this poor bastard a hand, shall we?”

The warden was lucky, if you wanted to call getting wounded lucky. The gouge was on the back of his calf, and fairly clean as such things went. He was already struggling back to his feet again by the time Dowling and the driver came over to him. “Let me get bandaged up and I’ll go back on duty,” he insisted.

Dowling doubted that; the wound was larger and deeper than the warden seemed to think it was. But it hadn’t hamstrung him, as it would have were it a little lower. “Where’s the closest cellar?” Dowling asked. “We’ll get you patched up, and then we’ll worry about what happens next.”

“Just you follow me,” the civil-defense warden said. Dowling and the driver ended up hauling him along with his arms draped over their shoulders. Trying to put weight on the leg showed him he was hurt worse than he’d thought. He guided them to a hotel down the block. Dowling was soaked by the time he got there. Manhandling the warden down the stairs to the cellar was another adventure, but he and the driver managed.

People in the cellar exclaimed at the spectacle of a bedraggled brigadier general. All Dowling said was, “Is there a doctor in the house?” For a wonder, there was. He went to work on the wounded warden. Dowling turned to his driver. “Do you think you can fix that flat once the bombs stop falling?”

“I’ll give it my best shot, sir,” the driver said resignedly.

It took more work than he’d expected, for the fragment that got the trunk had torn into the spare tire and inner tube. The driver had to wait till a cop came by, explain his predicament to him, and wait again till the policeman came back with a fresh tire and tube. They didn’t get moving again till well after midnight.

As Dowling fitfully dozed in the back seat, he hoped the driver wasn’t dozing behind the wheel. The Ford didn’t crash into another auto or go off the road, so the driver evidently managed to keep his eyes open.

More problems with the road stalled them outside of Washington. The driver did start snoring then. Dowling let him do it till things started moving again. They didn’t get through the de jure capital of the USA until after dawn. That let Dowling see that Confederate bombers had hit it even harder than Philadelphia. Still, it wasn’t the almost lunar landscape it had been after the USA took it back from the CSA in the Great War.

The Confederates had knocked out the regular bridges over the Potomac. Engineers had run up pontoon bridges to take up the slack. The Ford bumped into what had been Virginia and was now an eastern extension of West Virginia.

Daniel MacArthur made his headquarters near the little town of Manassas, scene of the first U.S. defeat—but far from the last—in the War of Secession. As Dowling, wet and weary, got out of the motorcar, he hoped that wasn’t an omen.

W
aiting for the first big U.S. attack to go in wasn’t easy for Flora Blackford. If it succeeded, it would bring the war back to something approaching an even keel. If it failed . . . She shook her head. She refused to think about what might happen if it failed. It would succeed. It
would
.

Ordinary business had to go on while she waited along with the rest of the United States. Studying the budget was part of ordinary business. If you looked long enough, you learned to spot all sorts of interesting things.

Some of the most interesting were the ones that were most puzzling. Why was there a large Interior Department appropriation for construction work in western Washington? And why didn’t the item explain what the work was for?

She called an undersecretary and tried to find out. He said, “Hold on, Congresswoman. Let me see what you’re talking about. Give me the page number, if you’d be so kind.” She did, and listened to him flipping paper. “All right. I see the item,” he told her. Close to half a minute of silence followed, and then a sheepish laugh. “To tell you the truth, Congresswoman, I have no idea
what
that’s about. It does seem a little unusual, doesn’t it?”

“It seems more than a little unusual to me,” Flora answered. “Who would know something about it?”

“Why don’t you try Assistant Secretary Goodwin?” the undersecretary said. “Hydroelectric is his specialty.”

“I’ll do that,” Flora said. “Let me have his number, please.” She wrote it down. “Thanks very much.” She hung up and dialed again.

Assistant Secretary Goodwin had a big, deep voice. He
sounded
more important than the junior functionary with whom she’d spoken a moment before. But when she pointed out the item that puzzled her, what he said was, “Well, I’ll be . . . darned. What’s that doing there?”

“I was hoping you could tell me,” Flora said pointedly.

“Congresswoman, this is news to me,” Goodwin said. She believed him. He seemed angry in a special bureaucratic way: the righteous indignation of a man who’d had his territory encroached upon. She didn’t think anyone could fake that particular tone of voice.

Tapping a pencil on her desk, she asked, “If you don’t know, who’s likely to?”

“It would have to be the secretary himself,” Goodwin answered. “Let’s see which one of us can call him first. I aim to get to the bottom of this, too.”

The Secretary of the Interior was a Midwesterner named Wallace. The first time Flora tried to reach him, his secretary said he was on another line. Goodwin must have dialed faster. “I’ll have him call you back, if you like,” the secretary added.

“Yes. Thank you. Please do that.” Flora gave her the number and returned the handset to its cradle. She did some more pencil tapping. Were they just passing the buck? Her mouth tightened. If they were, they’d be sorry.

She jumped a little when the telephone rang a few minutes later. Bertha said, “It’s Assistant Secretary Roosevelt, Congresswoman.”

“Oh!” Flora said. She’d been expecting the Secretary of the Interior. She wondered what Roosevelt wanted. More propaganda? She shrugged. Only one way to find out. “Put him through, please.”

“Hello, Congresswoman.” As usual, Franklin Roosevelt sounded jaunty. No one who didn’t know would ever imagine he couldn’t get out of his wheelchair. “How are you this lovely morning?”

It wasn’t lovely; it was still raining. Even so, Flora couldn’t help smiling. “I’m well, thanks,” she answered. “And you?”

“In the pink,” Roosevelt said. “I just had a call from Hank. He thought I might be able to tell you what was going on.”

“Hank?” Flora echoed with a frown. “Hank who? You’re a step or two ahead of me.”

“Wallace,” Roosevelt told her. “You’ve been talking to people about that Washington State item in the Interior Department budget. It’s no wonder nobody over there knows anything much about it. It really has more to do with my shop, if you must know.”

“With the War Department?” Flora said. “Why isn’t it listed under War Department appropriations, in that case?”
Curiouser and curiouser,
she thought.

Roosevelt coughed a couple of times. He sounded faintly embarrassed as he answered, “Well, Congresswoman, one reason is that we didn’t want to draw the Confederates’ notice and make them wonder what we were doing way out there.” He laughed. “So we drew your notice and made you wonder instead. Seems we can’t win.”

“So you did,” Flora said. “What
are
you doing way out there? Something large, by the size of the appropriation you’re asking for.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you what it is,” Roosevelt said.

“What?” Now Flora really did start to get angry. “What do you mean, you can’t? If you don’t want to talk to me here, Mr. Roosevelt, you can answer questions under oath in front of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. Now—what sort of boondoggle has the War Department got going on in Washington State?”

“We don’t believe it’s a boondoggle. We wouldn’t be working on it if we did,” Roosevelt answered. “And you can summon me to the Joint Committee, no doubt about it. But if you do, I will lie like Ananias. That will be the best possible way for me to serve my country. I will be convincing, too. Your colleagues, or enough of them, will believe me. And, of course, I will deny we ever had this conversation.”

He meant every word of it. Flora had dealt with a lot of recalcitrant bureaucrats. Once in a great while, one of them would dig in his heels and refuse to move. Plainly, that was what was happening here. Flora didn’t understand why, though. “What could possibly be so important?” she asked.