Return Engagement (73 page)

“How come?” somebody in back of Rodriguez called.

“How come?” Billy Joe Hamilton echoed. “You’ll find out how come. Bet your balls you will. I got one other thing to tell you, too—no matter how tough y’all reckon you got it, you don’t know squat about what tough is. Fellas who were doin’ this before we got the system down, they’re the ones who can talk about tough. What they saw is tougher’n any battlefield.”

“Bullshit.” This time, it was a man off to Rodriguez’s left. Rodriguez was thinking the same thing himself. Nothing was worse than a battlefield. Nothing could be. He was convinced of that. The Devil hadn’t known how to run hell before he took a long look at a Great War battlefield.

“I heard that,” Hamilton said. “You go ahead. You think that way. y’all’ll find out what it’s like now. But that ain’t a patch on what camp guards
were
doin’. No, sir, not even a patch.”

Rodriguez remained dubious. Everybody who was an old-timer at this, that, or the other thing always went on and on about how tough things had been before all these new fellows came in. Talk was cheap. Talk was also commonly nonsense.

Camp guards learned by doing. They ran their own camp, out there past Decatur, Texas. They were Great War veterans, every man jack of them. They knew all they needed to know about barbed wire and machine guns. Most of them had taken prisoners, too. Some of them had
been
prisoners, which also taught a lot about what they needed to know.

Submachine guns were new to Rodriguez, but easy to learn. For guard duty, they were better than the bolt-action Tredegar he’d carried during the last war. No one bullet had the stopping power of a Tredegar round, but you could do a lot of shooting mighty fast with a submachine gun. If you got in trouble in the camp, that mattered more.

“Never trust the niggers here. Never believe the niggers here,” Assault Troop Leader Hamilton told his pupils. “You do, you’ll end up with your throat cut. They didn’t get in here on account of they was nice people. They got here on account of they was trouble.”

That Rodriguez believed. The blacks in the camp looked like men who would raise hell if they ever got the chance. They looked like captured enemy soldiers, as a matter of fact. In essence, they were. Rodriguez figured he would have been safer guarding Yankee prisoners. They would have been less desperate than the Negroes here.

A truck with an iron box of a cargo compartment pulled up to the camp. At the morning roll call, the experienced guards picked twenty Negroes from the lineup. “You men are going to be transferred to another camp,” one of them told the blacks.

There were the usual grumbles. “I jus’ got here two weeks ago,” a prisoner complained. “How come you shippin’ me somewheres else?”

“To confuse you. Working pretty good, isn’t it?” the guard answered. The prisoner scratched his head. He didn’t know how to take that, and so he warily accepted it.

Rodriguez was one of the guards outside the barbed-wire perimeter who made sure the Negroes didn’t try to run off on their way to the truck. The black men gave no trouble. Most of them seemed glad to get away from where they were. One of the experienced guards closed the doors behind the prisoners and dogged them shut. The bar that did the trick seemed exceptionally sturdy.

“We’ll need a driver,” Hamilton said. Rodriguez didn’t volunteer; he couldn’t drive.

They packed him and the other trainee prison guards into a couple of ordinary trucks with butternut canvas canopies over their beds. Those trucks followed the one with the Negro prisoners. Rodriguez wondered where they were going. He didn’t know of any other camps close by. Of course, Texas had more empty space than it knew what to do with. Maybe there were others, somewhere not too far over the horizon.

His truck ride lasted about an hour. Looking out at where he’d been—he couldn’t see where he was going—he found he’d passed through a gate in a perimeter marked off by barbed wire.
Maybe it’s another camp after all,
he thought.

The truck stopped. “Everybody out!” Billy Joe Hamilton yelled. “y’all got work to do!”

Out Rodriguez came. Like a lot of the other middle-aged men who’d ridden with him, he grunted and stretched. His back ached. The truck had been anything but comfortable.

The other truck, the one with the Negroes in it, had stopped, too, at the edge of a long, deep trench a bulldozer had scraped in the ground. Rodriguez looked around. All he saw was prairie. They were a long way from anything that mattered. He nodded to himself. He remembered this kind of landscape from when he’d fought in the Great War, though he’d been farther west then.

“You!” Hamilton pointed to him. “Open the rear doors on that there truck.”

“Yes, Assault Troop Leader!” Rodriguez answered. His pure English would never be great, but he followed what other people said to him, and he could speak enough to get by. Nobody’d complained about the way he talked.

He went over to the truck with the iron box for a passenger compartment. He needed a moment, but no more than a moment, to figure out how the heavy bar that kept the doors closed was secured. He got it loose before the Freedom Party guard either showed him or brushed him aside as a goddamn dumb greaser. That done, he grabbed the handles and pulled the doors open.

“¡Madre de Dios!”
he exclaimed as the fecal stink poured out of the compartment and into the chilly air. He crossed himself, not once but two or three times in quick succession. None of the blacks in the truck remained alive. They sprawled atop one another in unlovely, ungainly death.

“Isn’t this smooth?” Hamilton said. “We take ’em out, we drive ’em off, and they’re dead by the time they get where they’re goin’. Matter of fact, the only place they’re goin’is straight to hell.” He shook his head, correcting himself. “Nope—other place they’re goin’is right into this here ditch. y’all drag ’em out of the truck and fling ’em in. Then the ’dozer’ll scrape the dirt back over ’em, and that’ll be the end of that. Good riddance to bad rubbish.” He made hand-washing motions.

Nobody said no. The trainees did the job willingly enough. It didn’t bother Rodriguez all that much once he got over his first horrified astonishment. The Freedom Party hadn’t been kidding when it said it wanted to put Negroes in their place. After all the trouble they’d caused the Confederate States, he wasn’t going to lose much sleep over what happened to them.

Into the ditch thudded the corpses, one after another. They were still limp; they hadn’t started to stiffen.
Good riddance to bad rubbish,
the Freedom Party guard had said. To him, and to Hipolito Rodriguez as well, that was all they were. Rubbish.

Somebody asked what struck him as a practical question: “Can we kill ’em off faster’n they breed?”

“Oh, you bet your ass we can.” Assault Troop Leader Hamilton sounded as if he hadn’t the slightest doubt. “If we want to bad enough, we can do any goddamn thing we please. And Jake Featherston wants to do this really bad. Whatever we have to do to take care of it, well, that’s what we do. Pretty soon, we don’t got to worry about niggers no more.”

The guards murmured among themselves. Most of the murmurs sounded approving to Rodriguez. Nobody who didn’t see this as at least a possibility would have volunteered for camp-guard duty. Wiping his hands on his trousers, a trainee asked Hamilton, “How come this used to be a tougher duty than it is now?”

“On account of these trucks are new,” the Freedom Party guard answered. “Up until not so long ago, guards had to shoot the niggers they needed to get rid of.” His voice was altogether matter-of-fact. “That was hard on everybody. Some guards just couldn’t stand the strain, poor bastards. And the niggers knew what was comin’ when they got marched outa camp, too. Made ’em twice as dangerous as they would’ve been otherwise. Some fella named Pinkard, runs a camp over in Mississippi or Louisiana—one o’ them places—came up with this here instead.”

“¡Madre de Dios!”
Rodriguez said again, this time in an altogether different tone of voice.

“What’s eatin’ you?” the Party guard asked.

“I know this Pinkard—or a Pinkard, anyhow,” Rodriguez answered. “We fight together here in Texas in the Great War. Not many with this name, I think.”

“Reckon maybe you’re right,” the Freedom Party man agreed. “Ain’t that a kick in the nuts? This here Pinkard, he’s come up a long ways since then. Runnin’ a camp, that’s like commanding a regiment.”

Rodriguez tried to imagine Jefferson Pinkard as a high-ranking officer. It wasn’t easy. It was, in fact, damn hard. The Pinkard he’d known had been an ordinary soldier—till he started having woman trouble. After that, all he’d cared about was killing damnyankees. Up until then, he’d been like any sensible fighting man, more interested in staying alive himself than in getting rid of the enemy. But afterwards . . . Afterwards, he hadn’t cared whether he lived or died.

Evidently he’d lived. And now a lot of
mallates
were efficiently dead because he had. Rodriguez shrugged and pulled one of them out of the truck. Who’d miss them, after all?

XIX

T
hey’d sent Irving Morrell to a military hospital outside of Syracuse, New York. The sprawling wooden building had enormous Red Crosses painted on the roof, in case Confederate bombers came that far north. Up till now, none had. Syracuse had to seem like the end of the world to the Confederates. It sure as hell seemed like the end of the world to Morrell.

Dr. Silverstein had told him his shoulder would heal well. And it was healing—but not nearly fast enough to suit him. He looked at the snow blowing by outside and asked, “How long before I get out of here?”

The sawbones currently in charge of him was named Conrad Rohde. “I don’t know, exactly,” he answered. “A few weeks, I expect.”

“That’s what everybody’s been telling me for—a few weeks now,” Morrell said irritably.

Dr. Rohde shrugged. He was a big, blond, slow-moving man. Nothing seemed to faze him. A bad-tempered colonel sure didn’t. “Do you
want
a wound infection?” he inquired. “You told me you had one of those the last time you got shot. You’re older than you were then, you know.”

“Oh, yeah? Since when?” Even Morrell’s sarcasm drew nothing more than a chuckle from Rohde. Morrell did know he was older than he had been in 1914. Even with the wound infection that didn’t want to go away, he’d got his strength back then a hell of a lot faster than he was now.

“Do your exercises,” Rohde told him, and went off to inflict his resolute good cheer on some other injured soldier.

“Exercises.” Morrell said it as if it were a four-letter word. He started opening and closing and flexing his right hand. It didn’t hurt as much as it had when he’d begun doing it. Then it had felt as if his whole right arm were being dipped in boiling oil. Now he just imagined he had a wolverine gnawing at his shoulder joint. This was progress, of a sort.

Dr. Rohde insisted that the more he did the exercises, the easier they would become. To Morrell, that only proved that Dr. Rohde, no matter how smart and well trained he was, had never got shot. Morrell wished he could say the same thing.

Instead, he got an oak-leaf cluster for his Purple Heart, an honor he would gladly have done without. The decoration looked absurd on the green-gray government-issue pajamas he wore.

Even though the exercises hurt, he did keep up with them. He’d done that with his wounded leg, too, once it finally healed enough to let him. His thigh still twinged every once in a while, but he could use it as well as the other. Dr. Rohde beamed at him a few days later. “You are a conscientious man, Colonel.”

“Doc, what I am is one stubborn son of a bitch.” The two phrases meant the same thing, but Morrell preferred his version. He went on, “Long as you’re here, Doc, I’ve got a question for you.”

“If I know the answer, you will have it.” Rohde still looked and sounded mighty cheerful for a medical man. Morrell wondered if he’d been getting into the prescription brandy.

Well, if he had, that would only make his tongue flap more freely. Morrell asked, “Am I the only officer you know of who’s been specifically targeted, or are the Confederates really trying to knock off people who know what they’re doing?”

“I did not know you had been, let alone any others,” Rohde said.

So much for that,
Morrell thought. Aloud, he said, “I damn well was. That sniper bastard took two more shots at me after I got hit, when they were carrying me off to cover.”
And thank God for Sergeant Pound’s strong, broad back.
“He missed me by a gnat’s whisker both times, and he didn’t even try for anybody else. So am I just lucky, or is Jake Featherston trying to kill officers who’ve shown that they’re competent?”

“Let me try to find out.” Dr. Rohde pulled a notepad from the breast pocket of his long white jacket. He scribbled something on the pad, then stuck it back in the pocket.

“You going to be able to read that?” Morrell gibed.

Rohde took the pad out again, wrote something else in it, tore out that sheet of paper, set it on Morrell’s bed, and left his room. Morrell picked up the paper with his good hand.
Mind your own goddamn beeswax,
he read. The script was an elegant copperplate; a schoolteacher would have envied it. Morrell laughed out loud. There went one cliché, shot down like a dive bomber with a fighter on its tail.

For the next few days, Conrad Rohde was all business. Morrell wondered if he’d really offended the doctor. He didn’t think he should have, but how could anybody know for sure? Maybe he’d been the fourth guy to rag on Rohde’s writing in the space of an hour and a half. That would frost anybody’s pumpkin.

At the end of the examination, though, the doctor said, “I haven’t forgotten about what you asked. I’m trying to find out.”

“All right,” Morrell said mildly. “Uh—thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Rohde answered. “For whatever you may think it’s worth, some of the people to whom I’ve put your question seem to think it’s very interesting.”

“I’d rather they thought I was full of hops,” Morrell said. “The war would be easier if they did.”

Rohde didn’t say anything about that. He just finished writing up Morrell’s vital signs and left the room. When he came back that afternoon, he set another sheet of paper from his notepad on the bed. Again, he left without saying a word.

Morrell read the sheet. In that same precise script—
rub it in, Doc, why don’t you?
he thought—Rohde had listed seven names. Beside four of them, he’d written
KIA
. Beside the other three was the word
wounded.
Morrell recognized five of the names. He knew two of the men personally, and knew of the other three. They were all officers who were good at whatever they happened to do: infantry, artillery, one a genius at logistics. That lieutenant-colonel had kia by his name; someone else, someone surely less capable, was filling his slot now.

The doctor didn’t return till the following morning. By then, Morrell had all he could do not to explode. “They are!” he exclaimed. “The sons of bitches damn well are!”

“So it would seem,” Rohde answered. “You’ve certainly found a pattern. Whether the pattern means something is now under investigation.”

“If it’s there, it has to mean something,” Morrell said.

But the doctor shook his head. “If you’re in a crap game and somebody rolls four sevens in a row, that just means he’s hot. If he rolls fourteen sevens in a row, or twenty—”

“That means he’s playing with loaded dice,” Morrell broke in.

“Exactly,” Rohde said. “So—which is this? Four sevens in a row, or fourteen? All these officers have served at or near the front. Plenty of people who’d never make your list have got shot, too. So maybe this is a coincidence. But maybe it isn’t, too. And if it isn’t, you’re the one who spotted it.”

“Thanks a lot,” Morrell said. “There’s one more prize I’d just as soon not win.”

“Why?” Rohde said. “We can do a better job of protecting our people if we know this than we could before we knew. That may come to matter, and not a little, either.”

Morrell’s grimace, for once, had nothing to do with his shattered shoulder. “And what else will we do? Go after the Confederates the same way?”

“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised,” Dr. Rohde said.

“Neither would I.” Morrell pulled another horrible face. “Makes the war even more wonderful than the bombing raids and the poison gas and the machine guns, doesn’t it?”

Rohde shrugged. “No doubt. You’re the one who makes his living fighting it, though, you and the fellows like you on the other side. I just make mine patching up the ones you don’t quite kill.”

“Thanks a lot, Doc. I love you, too.”

“I’m not saying we don’t need soldiers. I’ve never said that. There’s no way to get rid of such people, not without everybody doing it at the same time. If you think twenty sevens in a row are unlikely . . . But don’t expect a doctor to get all misty-eyed and romantic about war, either. I’ve seen too much for that.”

“So have I,” Morrell said soberly. “Plenty of people have ugly jobs. That doesn’t mean they don’t need doing.”

“Well, all right—we’re not so far from the same page, anyhow,” Rohde said. “I’ll tell you, though, I’ve heard plenty who won’t admit even that much.”

Somebody down the hall shouted his name. He muttered something vile under his breath, then hurried off.
Patching up another one my Confederate counterparts didn’t quite kill,
Morrell thought.
They’ll get reprimanded if they don’t quit screwing up like that.
He chuckled, though it wasn’t really funny. Up till now, he’d never thought about war from a doctor’s point of view.

Here he was, flat on his back again. For the first time since he’d got shot in 1914, he had plenty of time to lie there and think about things. He couldn’t do much else, as a matter of fact. After he asked for a wireless set, he had it to help him pass the time. Sometimes the saccharine music and the sports shows and the inane quizzes made him want to scream. Sometimes what passed for news in the civilian world made him want to scream, too.

He solved that problem by turning off the wireless. Then he stared at the set sitting there on the little table by the bed. What good was it to him if he didn’t listen to it? On the other hand, what good was it to him if it drove him out of his mind?

He was still trying to work that out three days later when he had a visitor. “Good God in the foothills!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t know they let you out of Philadelphia except when you needed to make a mess on the floor.”

Colonel John Abell gave him a thin, cool smile—the only kind the cerebral General Staff office seemed to own. “Hello,” Abell said. “You do pose interesting questions, don’t you? Well, I’ve got a question for you—can you open this?” He handed Morrell a small box covered in felt.

“Damn straight I can. I can do almost anything one-handed these days.” Morrell proceeded to prove himself right—and then stared at the pair of small silver stars inside the box.

“Congratulations, General Morrell,” Abell said.

“Oh, my,” Morrell whispered. “Oh, my.” He went on staring. After some little while, he realized he ought to say a bit more. Softly, he went on, “The last time I felt something like this, I was holding my new daughter in my arms.”

“Congratulations,” Abell repeated. “If the Confederates think you’re important enough to be worth killing, I daresay you’re important enough to deserve stars.”

Morrell gave him a sharp look. The General Staff officer looked back blandly. He probably wasn’t kidding. He almost surely wasn’t, in fact. What Morrell had done in the field looked unimpressive to Philadelphia. What the enemy thought of him was something else again. That mattered to the powers that be. In the end, though, how Morrell had got the stars hardly mattered. That he’d got them made all the difference in the world.

J
efferson Pinkard swore when the telephone in his office jangled. Telephone calls were not apt to be good news. He always feared they’d be from Richmond. As far as he could remember, calls from Richmond had never been good news. When his curses failed to make the telephone stop ringing, he reluctantly picked it up. “Pinkard here.”

“Hello, Pinkard. This is Ferd Koenig. Freedom! How are you this morning?”

“Freedom! I’m fine, sir. How are you?”
What the hell do you want with me?
But that wasn’t a question Jeff could ask the Attorney General.

“Couldn’t be better,” Koenig said expansively, which only made Jeff more suspicious. The Attorney General continued, “Got a question for you.”

“Shoot.” What else could Pinkard say? Nothing, and he knew it.

“You reckon Mercer Scott’s ready to take over Camp Dependable?”

Ice ran through Pinkard’s veins. “I reckon that depends, sir,” he said cautiously.

“Depends on what?”

Caution flew out the window. “On what you intend to do with me, sir. I’ve run this here camp since we took it over from that goddamn Huey Long. Don’t think I’ve done too bad a job, either. Just in case you forgot, I was the fellow came up with those trucks. Nobody else—me.”

“Easy, there. Easy. I do remember. So does the President. Nobody’s putting you on the shelf,” Ferdinand Koenig said. “It’s not like that at all. Matter of fact, I’ve got a new job for you, if you want it.”

“Depends on what it is,” Pinkard said, dubious still.

“Well, how long have you been complaining that Camp Dependable isn’t big enough for everything it’s supposed to do?”

“Only forever.”

Koenig laughed, which did nothing to make Jeff feel any easier. “All right, then,” the Attorney General said. “How would you like to run a camp that’s big enough for everything? Not just run it, but set it up from scratch. You’ve got practice at that kind of thing, don’t you?”

“You know damn well I do, sir,” Jeff answered. “Wasn’t for me startin’ up a camp in Mexico, I never would’ve got into this here line of work at all.”
And there’s plenty of times I wish I never did.
“Whereabouts’ll this new camp be at?”

“Texas,” Koenig said. “We’ll put you out on the goddamn prairie, so you’ll have plenty of room to grow. There’ll be a railroad spur out to the place so you can ship in supplies easy. Won’t be any trouble shippin’ in plenty of niggers, either.”

“
That
kind of camp again?” Pinkard said heavily. “I was hopin’ you’d let me handle real prisoners of war.”

“Any damn fool can do that,” Ferd Koenig said. “We’ve got plenty o’ damn fools doing it, too. But this other business takes somebody with brains and somebody with balls. That’s you, unless. . . .”

Unless you haven’t got the balls to do it.
That hurt. Angrily, Pinkard said, “I’ve never backed away from anything you threw at me, Koenig, and you know it goddamn well. I’ll do this, and I’ll do it right. I just wish I had my druthers once in a while, is all.”

He waited. If the Attorney General felt like canning him because he had the nerve to answer back . . . If he did, then he would, that was all. Jeff refused to worry about it. He’d paid his dues, and he’d given the Freedom Party everything it could possibly have asked from him. He could always find other things to do now. He was too old to make a likely soldier, but he still had his health. Factories lined up to hire people like him these days.