Return Engagement (62 page)

Patton’s camouflage-netted tent stood with several others in among some trees not far south of Culpeper, Virginia. The deception would have been better in the summertime. With leaves gone from trees, the tents were noticeable in spite of the netting. With luck, though, the Red Crosses on the auto would make Yankee pilots think they made up a field hospital.

“Mr. President!” Patton jumped out of a folding chair, sprang to stiff attention, and saluted. “Freedom!” he added.

“Freedom!” Jake echoed automatically. “At ease, General. Are we ready to twist the damnyankees’ tail?”

“Just about, sir,” Patton answered. He had some of the palest, coldest eyes Featherston had ever seen. They lit up now with a glow like the northern lights shining on Greenland ice. “Then we don’t just twist it. We land on it with both feet.”

“And won’t they yowl when we do!” Featherston said.

“That’s the idea.” Patton pointed north toward the din of battle. “These head-on attacks—all they prove is that General MacArthur hasn’t figured out what to do with all the tools his War Department gave him.”

“Well, General, if you think I mind, you can damn well think again,” Jake said. “When you’re ready, I want you to do just what you said. We’ll bundle these bastards out of your country with their jumped-on tails between their legs.”

“We’ll do it, Mr. President. We’re better men than they are. We always have been,” Patton said. “And while wars may be fought with weapons, they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory.”

When he spoke of the man who led, he thought of himself. When Jake Featherston heard it, he thought of
himself.
He nodded. “You’ve got that right, General. The triumph of the will is going to take us where we want to go, and the United States won’t be able to do a thing about it.”

“In war nothing is impossible, provided you use audacity,” Patton said. “We have it. The Yankees don’t. To win battles you do not beat weapons—you beat the soul of man of the enemy first.”

“Damn right!” Jake said enthusiastically. “When the Freedom Party was down in the, ‘20s, we could have folded up our tents and packed it in. But I hung tough, and that made people stick with me. I knew our time would come around.”

“That is the way it works, Mr. President,” Patton said. “And I hope the way things work in our counterattack will be to your satisfaction. My only concern is that the U.S. forces have General Dowling commanding their right wing.”

“Why worry about him?” Featherston said. “You beat him in Ohio. You can do it again.”

“Well, sir, I hope so. But he was sensitive to his flanks there,” Patton replied. “He didn’t fight a bad campaign, given what he had to work with. Of course, Colonel Morrell commanded his armor then, and Morrell is still in the West, for which I am glad.”

“You’re not the first officer I’ve heard who talks about Morrell like that,” Jake observed. “Maybe something ought to happen to him.”

“Maybe something should,” Patton agreed. “It’s not what you would call sporting, but war is not a sporting business. I don’t give a damn about good losers. I want the tough bastards who go out there and win, no matter how.”

“That sure as hell sounds right to me. When I get back to Richmond, I’ll see what we can do about it.” Jake made a sour face. He didn’t want to go back to the Confederate capital. In a lot of ways, he really would rather have been an artilleryman than President. But he talked about duty to other people. He couldn’t go on pretending it didn’t matter for him.

He motored back to Richmond in the Birmingham with the prominent Red Crosses. No Yankee airplanes attacked it, though a couple of flights of fighters roared by at not much above treetop height, looking for things to shoot up. He got out of the auto at the foot of Shockoe Hill, and rode to the Presidential mansion near the top in his armored limousine. He didn’t want the auto with the Red Crosses seen near the Gray House. That might give the damnyankees ideas they would be better off not having.

“Good to have you back, Mr. President,” Lulu said.

He smiled at his secretary. “Thank you kindly, sweetheart. It’s good to be back.” He was lying through his teeth, but he didn’t want Lulu to know it. He didn’t care to hurt her feelings by making her think he would sooner have been away from her.

His desk was piled high with papers. He swore under his breath, even though he’d known it would be. He wished he could aim a 105 at it and blow it to hell and gone. If he’d known how much paperwork being President of the CSA entailed, he wouldn’t have wanted the job so much. Despite hating it, he had to keep up with it. If he gave it all to flunkies, he wouldn’t be able to watch what went on. Nobody was going to get away with any private empire-building, not if he could help it.

He sifted through things as fast as he could, writing
Yes—J.F.
on some and
No—J.F.
on others and setting still others aside for consultation before he decided what to do about them. You had to use experts—you couldn’t know everything yourself. But you had to watch them, too; otherwise they’d spend you out of house and home. Jake chuckled wryly, remembering the professor who’d wanted a fortune to play around with uranium. There were plenty more like him, too.

Every once in a while, something interested Featherston enough to make him slow down and read carefully instead of skimming. England was doing something new with airplane engines, something that didn’t use a propeller but that promised a better turn of speed than anyone had managed with props.
We need to find out everything we can about this,
Jake wrote.

That might not be easy. In the last war, both sides had had a rough time crossing the Atlantic. Even submersibles had had trouble. The Yankees had been ready to copy a German fighting scout, but the sub carrying an example of the airplane got sunk. That set the USA back for months. The same thing could happen to any ship leaving the UK for the CSA. It could—but it had better not.

A note from Ferdinand Koenig also drew Jake’s full attention. Things at Camp Dependable and some of the others were going the way everybody’d hoped they would. Featherston nodded to himself. That was good news.

Fewer bombers than usual came over Richmond that night; the ones that did seemed to strike mainly at the railroad yards. Most of the U.S. bombers dropped their loads farther north, at the Confederates defending against the Yankee onslaught. Jake hoped antiaircraft guns and night fighters knocked down a lot of them. No matter what he hoped, he knew better than to be too optimistic. U.S. gunfire hadn’t badly hurt the Confederate airplanes that struck at Washington, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and other cities north of the border.

At dawn the next morning, the distant crashing of guns announced General Patton’s counterattack out of the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Telephones in the Gray House started ringing right away. Aides brought Featherston notes on how things were going. As soon as he finished breakfast, the notes stopped satisfying. He had the calls routed to his own line, and started tracing progress on a map of Virginia that had gone up on his office wall next to the map of Ohio.

Before long, he was muttering to himself. Things weren’t going as well as he’d hoped they would. Things never went as well as he hoped they would. In his mind, every campaign was a walkover till it turned out not to be. But reports of heavy enemy resistance all along the U.S. right flank did nothing to improve his temper. He barked at everyone who came in to see him except Lulu, and he never barked at her.

He tried to talk directly to Patton. He found out he couldn’t; the general commanding the barrels was in one himself. There was another way in which the two men were very much alike: they both wanted to get out there and fight. Most people didn’t have the stomach—or the balls—for it. Even a lot of officers were happier well back of the line. But Jake and Patton both enjoyed mixing it up with the enemy—and if he shot back, well, so what?

As the day wore along, the news gradually got better. The Yankees began falling back from positions they’d tenaciously defended all morning. But Jake’s vision of cutting off their salient looked more like a pipe dream with each passing hour.

On the other hand, it didn’t look as if U.S. forces were driving so hard for the Rapidan. Some units that had been spearheading the U.S. attack turned back to help deal with Patton’s counterblow. Featherston nodded to himself. In war, you rarely got everything you wanted. He hadn’t smashed the Yankees, or he didn’t think he had, but he’d slowed them down, maybe even stopped them. That would do. It would definitely do.

J
efferson Pinkard felt awkward in a civilian suit. He could hardly remember the last time he’d worn one. Lately, he’d just about lived in his uniform. The gray flannel suit smelled of mothballs. It didn’t fit too well, either. His shirt collar was tight around his neck. He’d added a few pounds since the last time he got into ordinary civvies.

But he didn’t think he ought to call on Edith Blades in his camp commandant’s uniform. It would only remind her that her husband had worn one like it, if less fancy. That didn’t seem to be the right thing to do, not after Chick Blades had killed himself.

Before going on to Edith’s house, Jeff stopped at a florist’s in Alexandria and picked up a bouquet of daisies and chrysanthemums. He felt callow as he carried it up the walk and knocked at her front door. That made him want to laugh. There was a feeling he hadn’t had in a hell of a long time—not since before the Great War. He had it again, though.

He knocked on the door. She opened it. She was wearing dark gray, too: not quite widow’s weeds, but not far from them. “Hello, Mr. Pinkard, uh, Jeff,” she said.

“Hello.” Awkwardly, Jeff thrust the flowers at her. “I brought you these.”

“Thank you. They’re very pretty.” She stepped aside. “Why don’t you come in for a minute while I put ’em in something?”

“I’ll do that.” The house was small and cramped. Another woman with Edith’s dark blond hair and strong cheekbones sat on the sofa keeping an eye on the two small boys wrestling on the floor not far away. Jeff nodded to her. “Ma’am.”

“I’m Judy Smallwood,” she said. “I’m Edith’s sister”—as if Jeff couldn’t figure that out for himself—“and I’ll be riding herd on these two terrors tonight.” The terrors kept on trying to assassinate each other.

Edith brought the flowers out in a green pressed-glass vase not quite big enough for the job. She started to put the vase on the coffee table in front of the sofa, then thought better of it. The top of the wireless cabinet made a safer choice. Once she’d set the vase there, she nodded to Jeff. “Well, I’m ready,” she said, and she might have been challenging the world or herself to tell her she wasn’t.

“Let’s go, then,” he said.

“Have a good time,” Edith’s sister called after them. Jeff held the door open for Edith and closed it again after she went through. He opened the Birmingham’s passenger-side door, too, then went around and got in behind the wheel himself.

As he started the auto, Edith said, “I want to thank you again for everything you did about Chick’s pension. That was kinder’n anybody had any need of bein’.”

“Least I could do.” He put the motorcar in gear and pulled away from the curb. “He gave his life for his country, just like he got shot at the front.” That was more true than the prison guard’s widow knew.

Edith Blades looked down at her hands. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring any more, but Jeff could still see the mark on her finger. “Thank you,” she repeated, not much above a whisper.

He parked right across the street from the Bijou. The theater wasn’t going to be crowded tonight. People came up by ones and twos. No line stretched along the sidewalk out from the ticket counter, the way it did when a hit came to town. If a hit had been in town, he would have taken her to it. As things were, he had to make do. He set two quarters on the counter, got two poorly printed tickets, and gave them to the attendant at the door, who tore them in half.

At the refreshment counter, he bought popcorn and candy and waxed cardboard cups of fizzy Dr. Hopper. Edith called up a faint smile. “Been a while since I went to a picture show,” she said. “Even before Chick . . . died . . . It’s been a while.”

“Well, we’re here,” Jeff said. “Let’s have the best time we can.” She nodded.

The plush seats creaked when they sat down in them. The seats needed reupholstering; too many backs and bottoms had rubbed against them since they were new. Everything about the Bijou was overdue for a fix-up. The carpet had seen better years. The gold paint on the lamps was dusty and peeling. The curtain in front of the screen had frayed, threadbare spots.

And all of that stopped mattering the minute the lights went down and the threadbare curtain pulled back. All that mattered were the pictures on the screen. The newsreel came first, of course. There was President Featherston, firing a cannon at the Yankees. There were General Patton’s barrels rumbling forward. There were burnt-out Yankee barrels and throngs of dirty, disheveled U.S. prisoners trudging into captivity with their hands above their heads. There were Confederate bombers blasting U.S. cities. Patriotic music blared. The announcer gabbled. By what he said, the war was as good as won. Jeff hoped he was right.

The serial was installment number nine—or was it number ten?—about a blond heroine kidnapped by Red Negro guerrillas and constantly threatened with a fate worse than death, a fate she somehow kept evading episode after episode. The Negroes mugged and rolled their eyes and showed their teeth. They seemed to know they’d get what was coming to them in the last reel. Jeff knew they’d get worse than that if they didn’t shut up and do as they were told. They might end up in Camp Dependable, for instance.

In the feature, a loose-living woman from New York City (was there any other kind?—in the CSA, the place was a synonym for depravity) tried to seduce military secrets from a Confederate aeronautical engineer. His love for the girl he’d left behind him kept him from yielding to temptation, and everything turned out for the best. In films, it always did.