The Grapple (82 page)

“It ain’t bullshit!” the Freedom Party Guardsman said. “You’ll find out! And you’ll be sorry when you do, too.”

“Yeah, sure, buddy,” Chester said. Two men took the POW off to the rear.

“The crap they come up with,” another U.S. soldier said, lighting up a Habana he’d taken from a prisoner. “He sounded like he believed it, too.”

“People used to believe the world was flat,” Chester said. The soldier laughed and nodded. But the Guardsman
had
sounded mighty sure of himself. And Chester remembered all the rockets the Confederates seemed to have pulled from nowhere. He was a little more worried than he let on—not a lot, but a little.

F
lora Blackford hurried into the House chamber. She’d got the summons to the joint session of Congress only a little while before. Other Representatives and Senators were grumbling at having to change plans to get here on time. She understood why. The President wouldn’t ask for a joint session much in advance. That would give the Confederates—and maybe other enemies—more time to come up with something unpleasant.

The Speaker of the House rapped loudly for order. When he got something close to quiet, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I have the distinct honor and high privilege of introducing the President of the United States, Charles W. La Follette!”

Applause rang through the hall. Charlie La Follette took his place behind the lectern. He was tall and ruddy and handsome, with a splendid shock of white hair the cartoonists loved. He’d been President for almost a year and a half now, but still didn’t seem to have stepped out from under Al Smith’s shadow. Maybe today was the day.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the Congress, my fellow Americans, 1943 has blessed our arms with victory,” he said. “When the year began, we were driving invaders from western Pennsylvania. Now Pennsylvania and Ohio have been liberated, and our armies stand not far from Atlanta, the hub of the Confederate States of America.”

More applause washed over him, loud and fierce. He grinned and held up a hand. “We have also driven deep into Texas, and seen with our own eyes the horror the Confederates have visited on their Negro population. The murder factory called Camp Determination, at least, will perpetrate those horrors no more.”

This time, the applause was more tentative, though Flora clapped till her palms hurt. Pictures of those enormous mass graves—the words hardly did them justice—had been in all the weeklies for a while. Even so, the furor was less than she’d hoped for. People either didn’t care or didn’t want to believe what they were seeing was true.

“Everywhere, Confederate forces are in retreat,” the President said. “Even Jake Featherston must see that he cannot hope to win the war he started two and a half years ago. This being so, I call on him to surrender unconditionally and spare his country the bloodshed further resistance would cause.

“Though they do not deserve them, I promise him and his leading henchmen their lives. We will take them into exile on a small island, and will guard them there so they can no longer trouble North America and blight its hopes. Confederate soldiers will be disarmed and sent home. All Confederates, white and colored, will be guaranteed life, liberty, and property.

“Think well, President Featherston. If you reject this call, both you and your country will regret it. We will leave wireless frequency 640 kilocycles unjammed for your reply for the next forty-eight hours. You
will
be sorry if you say no.” He stepped away from the microphones on the lectern, putting notes back into an inside pocket of his jacket as he did.

Flora applauded again. So did most of the other members of Congress. If the war ended now…
If it ends now, Joshua won’t get hurt,
she thought. That alone gave her plenty of reason to hope. Hope or not, though, she feared Featherston would ignore the call.

The hall emptied as fast as it had filled. Now no one had a great big target to aim at. Flora hurried to her office. She tuned the wireless set there to 640. She didn’t know how long the President of the CSA would take to answer, but she wanted to hear him when he did.

He needed less than two hours. “Here is a statement by President Featherston of the Confederate States of America,” an announcer said.

“I’m Jake Featherston, and I’m here to tell you the truth.” That familiar, rasping, hate-filled voice snarled out of the wireless set. “And the truth is, people of the USA and President La Follette, we aren’t about to surrender. We’ve got no reason to. We’re going to win this war, and you’ll be laughing out of the other side of your mouth pretty damn quick.

“Philadelphia will get the message in just a few minutes. Philadelphia will get it twice, matter of fact. You wait, you watch, and you listen. Then you figure out who ought to be doing the surrendering. So long for now. You’ll hear more from me soon.”

Flora said something that would have shocked her secretary. It amounted to,
The nerve of the man!
He couldn’t have bombers that close to Philadelphia. U.S. Y-ranging gear would have picked them up. And there was bound to be a heavy combat air patrol above the de facto capital of the USA. Bombers—even captured U.S. bombers or C.S. warplanes painted in U.S. colors—might not get through. But Jake Featherston had sounded devilishly sure of himself.

Terrorists inside the city? People bombers waiting to press their buttons? Flora’s mouth tightened. She knew those were both possibilities. Could Featherston be so sure they’d do their job on short notice? Maybe that was why he hadn’t answered right after President La Follette’s speech. Or…

A loud explosion rattled Flora’s teeth and put ripples in the coffee in her half-full cup. Long experience told her that was a one-ton bomb going off not nearly far enough away. No air-raid sirens howled. It hadn’t fallen from an enemy bomber. Flora was sure of that.

Maybe three minutes later, another blast echoed through Philadelphia, this one a little farther from her office.
“Vey iz mir!”
she exclaimed. She didn’t know what Featherston and his minions had done, but no denying he’d kept his promise.

After about a quarter of an hour, he came back on the wireless. “I’m Jake Featherston, and I’m here to say I told you the truth,” he crowed. He must have waited till he got word his plan, whatever it was, had worked. “See how you like it, Philadelphia. Plenty more where those came from, and we’ll spread ’em around, too. Surrender? Nuts! We just started fighting.”

If anyone in Philadelphia knew what the Confederates had done, Franklin Roosevelt was likely to be the man. What point to having connections if you didn’t use them? Flora dialed his number, hoping she’d get through.

She did. “Hello, Flora!” Roosevelt still sounded chipper. As far as she could tell, he always did. But he went on, “Can’t talk long. Busy as the Devil after a fire at an atheists’ convention right now.”

“Heh,” Flora said uneasily. “You must know why I’m calling, though. What did the Confederates just do to us?”

“Well, it looks like a rocket,” the Assistant Secretary of War answered. “Two rockets, I should say.”

“Rockets? You mean they had them set up somewhere outside of town and fired them off when Featherston told them to?”

“No, I don’t think that’s what happened, not from the first look we’ve had at what’s left of them.” Franklin Roosevelt kept that jaunty air, but he sounded serious, too. And he wasted no time explaining why: “Our best guess is, they shot them up here from Virginia.”

“From Virginia?
Gevalt!
” Flora said. “That’s got to be—what? A couple of hundred miles? I didn’t know you could make rockets fly that far.”

“Unfortunately,
I
can’t. But Jake Featherston can, damn his black heart,” Roosevelt said.

“What can we do to stop them?” Flora asked.

“At this end, nothing. They get here too fast,” he said. “If they’ve got bases or launchers or whatever you call them, maybe we can bomb those. I hope so, anyway. But I don’t know that for a fact, you understand.”

“How much damage did they do?” Flora found one bad question after another.

“One blew a big hole in a vacant lot. The other one hit in front of an apartment building.” Now Roosevelt was thoroughly grim. “Quite a few casualties. But it would have been worse at night, with more people at home and fewer out working.”

“Do they aim them at Philadelphia? Or do they aim them, say, at the corner of Chestnut and Broad?” Yes, all kinds of nasty questions to ask.

“Right now, your guess is as good as mine. If I had to bet, I’d say they just aim them at Philadelphia. A rocket can’t be
that
accurate…can it? But that’s only a wild-ass guess—excuse the technical term.”

In spite of everything, Flora smiled. “Thanks, Franklin. I needed that. What are we going to do? If we can’t stop these rockets and we can’t even warn against them, how do we go on?”

“As best we can,” Roosevelt answered. “Stick a rabbit’s foot in your purse if you don’t already have one. Remember that every time the Confederates build one of these, they don’t build something else. And some will be duds, and some will go boom without doing much damage. As much as anything else, they’re trying to scare us.”

“They’re pretty good at it, aren’t they?” Flora said. Roosevelt laughed merrily, as if she were joking. What he hadn’t said was that some of the rockets would blow houses and apartments and factories to kingdom come. Then something even worse than that occurred to her. “Can they load anything besides ordinary explosives onto these…things?”

“You mean like gas? I think explosives would hurt us more,” Roosevelt said.

Flora had no doubt he was being dense on purpose. “Gas, maybe,” she said. “Or other things.” She didn’t want to say too much on the telephone.

Obviously, neither did he. “Not right away,” he answered. “I’ve already talked with some people. They need a bigger rocket or a smaller thing. So that’s all right for a while, anyhow.”

“For a while. How long is a while?”

“I have no idea. If it’s not till we finish licking them, it doesn’t matter. And now I’ve got to go. Other people to talk to. Stay safe.”

“How?” Flora asked, but she was talking to a dead line. Sighing, she hung up, too. She heard no more bangs out of the blue. That was something. Maybe Featherston had only two ready, and more would have to wait a while. Again, though, how long was a while? Not nearly so long as the Confederates would need to load a uranium bomb on a rocket—Flora was all too sure of that.

Her secretary looked into the inner office. “Were those booms the Confederates or the Mormons, Congresswoman?”

“Mr. Roosevelt says they were the Confederates, Bertha,” Flora answered.

Bertha nodded. “Figured you’d be talking to him. How did they sneak the bombs in? Can’t we stop stuff like that?”

Were the rockets secret? The War Department would probably like to keep them that way, but it would be like trying to classify the sunrise. Like it or not, everybody would know about them before long. Flora told Bertha what she’d heard.

“All the way up from Virginia? How do they do that?” Bertha said.

“If we knew, we’d do it, too,” Flora said dryly. “I bet like anything we’re trying to figure it out, though.”

“Oh, boy.” Bertha didn’t sound impressed, for which Flora could hardly blame her. “What’s to keep us all from getting murdered in our beds without even any warning?”

Nothing,
Flora thought. “We’re going to take Atlanta pretty soon. If we smash the Confederate States to pieces, they won’t be able to go on with the war.”

“Oh, boy,” her secretary repeated. “How long will that take?”

“I don’t know. Not too long, I hope.”
Please, God, let it be before they send Joshua into action. I haven’t asked You for much, but give me that.

“They’ll be shooting off these skyrocket things all the time till then?” Bertha asked.

“Not if we can bomb the places where they shoot them from,” Flora said.

“Hmp.” Bertha made a noise redolent of skepticism. “Did anybody know what a nasty war this would be before they went and started it?”

“Does anybody ever?”

“What are we going to do?” Bertha asked.

“What can we do? We’re stuck in it. We’ve got to win,” Flora said. Bertha didn’t say no, but she didn’t say yes, either.

BOOKS BY HARRY TURTLEDOVE

The Guns of the South

THE WORLDWAR SAGA

Worldwar: In the Balance

Worldwar: Tilting the Balance

Worldwar: Upsetting the Balance

Worldwar: Striking the Balance

COLONIZATION

Colonization: Second Contact

Colonization: Down to Earth

Colonization: Aftershocks

Homeward Bound

THE VIDESSOS CYCLE

The Misplaced Legion

An Emperor for the Legion

The Legion of Videssos

Swords of the Legion

THE TALE OF KRISPOS

Krispos Rising

Krispos of Videssos

Krispos the Emperor

THE TIME OF TROUBLES SERIES

The Stolen Throne

Hammer and Anvil

The Thousand Cities

Videssos Besieged

Noninterference

Kaleidoscope

A World of Difference

Earthgrip

Departures

How Few Remain

THE GREAT WAR

The Great War: American Front

The Great War: Walk in Hell

The Great War: Breakthroughs

AMERICAN EMPIRE

American Empire: Blood and Iron

American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold

American Empire: The Victorious Opposition

SETTLING ACCOUNTS

Settling Accounts: Return Engagement

Settling Accounts: Drive to the East

Settling Accounts: The Grapple

Settling Accounts: In at the Death*

*forthcoming