The Victorious Opposition (3 page)

Anne nodded. “I do, yes. But I’ll find out, won’t I? I don’t think you’ll send me back to South Carolina without telling me.”

“Nope. Matter of fact, I don’t intend to send you back to South Carolina at all,” Featherston said.

“What . . . do you intend to do with me, then?” Anne almost said,
to me.
Once upon a time, she’d imagined she could control him, dominate him, serve as a puppet master while he danced to her tune. A lot of people had made the same mistake: a small consolation, but the only one she had. Now he was the one who held the strings, who held all the strings in the Confederate States. Anne hated moving to any will but her own. She hated it, but she saw no way around it.

She tried not to show the nasty little stab of fear that shot through her. She’d abandoned the Freedom Party once, when its hopes were at a low ebb. If Jake Featherston wanted revenge, he could take it.

His smile got wider, which meant she hadn’t hidden that nasty little stab well enough. He
did
take revenge. He took it on everyone who he thought had ever wronged him. He took pride and pleasure in taking it, too. But, after he let her sweat for a few seconds, what he said was,
“Parlez-vous français?”

“Oui. Certainement,”
Anne answered automatically, even though, by the way Featherston pronounced the words, he didn’t speak French himself. She returned to English to ask, “Why do you want to know that?”

“How would you like to take a trip to gay Paree?” Featherston asked in return. No, he didn’t speak French at all. She hadn’t thought he did. He wasn’t an educated man. Shrewd? Yes. Clever? Oh, yes. Educated? No.

“Paris? I hate the idea,” Anne said crisply.

Featherston’s gingery eyebrows leaped. That wasn’t the answer he’d expected. Then he realized she was joking. He barked laughter. “Cute,” he said. “Cute as hell. Now tell me straight—will you go to Paris for me? I’ve got a job that needs doing, and you’re the one I can think of who’s best suited to do it.”

“Tell me what it is,” she said. “And tell me why. You’re not naming me ambassador to the court of King Charles XI, I gather.”

“No, I’m not doing that. You’ll go as a private citizen. But I’d rather trust you with a dicker than the damned striped-pants diplomats at the embassy there. They’re nothing but a pack of Whigs, and they want me to fall on my ass. You know what’s good for the country, and you know what’s good for the Party, too.”

“I . . . see.” Anne nodded again, slowly and thoughtfully. “You want me to start sounding out
Action Française
about an alliance, then?”

She saw she’d surprised him again. Then he laughed once more. “I already knew you were smart,” he said. “Don’t know why I ought to jump when you go and show me. Yeah, that’s pretty much what I’ve got in mind.
Alliance
likely goes too far.
Working arrangement
is more what I figure we can do. Probably all the froggies can do, too. They’ve got to worry about the Kaiser same way as we’ve got to worry about the USA.”

“I won’t be bringing back a treaty or anything of the sort, will I?” Anne said. “This is all unofficial?”

“Unofficial as can be,” Featherston agreed. “There’s a time to shout and yell and carry on, and there’s a time to keep quiet. This here is one of those last times. No point to getting the United States all hot and bothered, not as far as I can tell. So will you take care of this for me?”

Anne nodded. “Yes. I’d be glad to. I haven’t been to Europe since before the war, and I’d love to go again. And this has one more advantage for you, doesn’t it?”

“What’s that?” the president asked.

“Why, it gets me out of the country for a while,” Anne answered.

“Yes. I don’t mind that. I’m not ashamed to admit it to you, either,” Jake Featherston said. “I will be damned if I know what to make of you, or what I ought to do about you.” Again, he sounded as if he meant,
what I ought to do to you.
“If you can do something that’s useful to the country, and do it where you can’t get into much mischief, that works out fine for me. Works out fine for both of us, as a matter of fact.”

Again, Anne read between the lines:
if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic, I don’t have to wonder about whether I ought to dispose of you.
“Fair enough,” she said. All things considered, going into what wasn’t quite exile was as much as she could have hoped for. One thing Featherston had never learned was how to forgive.

C
olonel Irving Morrell watched from the turret of the experimental model as barrels chewed hell out of the Kansas prairie. Fortunately, Fort Leavenworth had a lot of prairie on its grounds to chew up. Once upon a time, it had occurred to Morrell that the traveling forts might find it useful to make their own smoke: that way, enemy gunners would have a harder time spotting them. When they traveled over dry ground, though, barrels kicked up enough dust to make the question of smoke moot.

Most of these barrels were the slow, lumbering brutes that had finally forced breakthroughs in the Confederate lines during the Great War. They moved at not much above a walking pace, they had a crew of eighteen, they had cannon at the front rather than inside a revolving turret, the bellowing engines were in the same compartment as the crew—and they had other disadvantages as well. The only advantage they had was that they existed. Crews could learn how to handle a barrel by getting inside them.

The experimental model had been a world-beater when Morrell designed it early in the 1920s. Rotating turret, separate engine compartment, wireless set, reduced crew . . . In 1922, no other barrel in the world touched this design.

But it wasn’t 1922 any more. The design was a dozen years older now. So was Irving Morrell. He didn’t show his years very much. He was still lean and strong in his early forties, and his close-cropped, light brown hair held only a few threads of gray. If his face was lined and tanned and weathered . . . well, it had been lined and tanned and weathered in the early 1920s, too. Hard service and a love for the outdoors had taken their toll there.

A Model T Ford in military green-gray bounced across the prairie toward the experimental model. One of the soldiers inside the motorcar waved to Morrell. When he waved back, showing he’d seen, the man held up a hand to get him to stop.

He waved again, then ducked down into the turret. “Stop!” he bawled into the speaking tube that led to the driver’s seat at the front of the barrel.

“Stopping, yes, sir.” The answer was tinny but understandable. The barrel clanked to a halt.

“What’s up, sir?” Sergeant Michael Pound, the barrel’s gunner, was insatiably curious—more than was good for him, Morrell often thought. His wide face might have been that of a three-year-old seeing his first aeroplane.

“I don’t know,” Morrell answered. “They’ve just sent out an auto to stop the maneuvers.”

Sergeant Pound’s wide shoulders moved up and down in a shrug. “Maybe the powers that be have gone off the deep end. Wouldn’t surprise me a bit.” Spending his whole adult life in the Army had left him endlessly cynical—not that he didn’t seem to have had a good running start beforehand. But then his green-blue eyes widened. “Or do you suppose—?”

That same thought had been in Morrell’s mind, too. “It would be sooner than I expected if it is, Sergeant. When was the last time those people up in Pontiac ever turned something out sooner than anyone expected?”

“I’m afraid that’s much too good a question, sir.” Pound pointed to the hatchway in the top of the commander’s cupola. “Pop your head out and see, though, why don’t you?” He made
out
sound almost like
oat
, as a Canadian would have; he came from somewhere up near the border.
What used to be the border,
Morrell reminded himself.

No matter what he sounded like, he’d given good advice. Morrell did stand up again in the turret. Any barrel commander worth his salt liked to stick his head out of the machine whenever he could. You could see so much more of the field that way. Of course, everybody on the field could also see you—and shoot at you. During the Great War, Morrell had often been forced back into the hell that was the interior of an old-style barrel by machine-gun fire that would have killed him in moments if he’d kept on looking around.

By the time he did emerge from the experimental model, the old Ford had come up alongside his barrel. The soldier who’d waved to him—a young lieutenant named Walt Cressy—called, “Sir, you might want to take your machine back to the farm.”

“Oh? How come?” Morrell asked.

Lieutenant Cressy grinned. “Just because, sir.”

That made Morrell grin, too. Maybe they really had been working overtime up in Pontiac. Maybe the combination of war with Japan—not that it was an all-out, no-holds-barred war on either side—and a Democratic administration had got engineers and workers to go at it harder than they were used to doing. “All right, Lieutenant,” Morrell said. “I’ll do that.”

Sergeant Pound whooped with glee when Morrell gave the order to break off from maneuvers and go back to the farm. “It has to be!” he said. “By God, it has to be.”

“Nothing
has
to be anything, Sergeant,” Morrell said. “If we haven’t seen that over the past ten years and more of this business . . .”

That made even Pound nod thoughtfully. Barrels had probably been
the
war-winning weapon during the Great War. After the war, they’d been the weapon most cut by budget trimmers in two successive Socialist administrations. No one had wanted to spend the money to improve them, to give them a chance to be the war-winning weapon of the next war. No one wanted to think there might be another big war. Morrell didn’t like contemplating that possibility, either, but not thinking about it wouldn’t make it go away.

The experimental model easily outdistanced the leftovers from the Great War, though they carried two truck engines apiece and it had only one. It was made from thin, mild steel, enough to give an idea of how it performed but not enough to stand up to bullets. It had plainly outdone everything else in the arsenal, and by a wide margin, too. For more than ten years, nobody’d given a damn. Now . . .

Now Morrell’s heart beat faster. If he was right, if the powers that be were waking up at last . . . Sergeant Michael Pound said, “Maybe seeing Jake Featherston snorting and stomping the ground down in Richmond put the fear of God into some people, too.”

“It could be,” Morrell said. “I’ll tell you something, Sergeant: he sure as hell puts the fear of God into me.”

“He’s a madman.” As usual, everything looked simple to Pound.

“Maybe. If he is, he’s a clever one,” Morrell said. “And if you put a clever madman in charge of a country that has good reason to hate the United States . . . Well, I don’t like the combination.”

“If we have to, we’ll squash him.” Pound was confident, too. Morrell wished he shared that confidence.

Then the experimental model got to the field where the barrels stayed now that they were back in service. Sure enough, a new machine squatted on the track-torn turf. The closer Morrell got, the better it looked. If he’d admired a woman as openly as he ogled that barrel, his wife, Agnes, would have had something sharp to say to him.

He climbed out through the hatch in the cupola and descended from the experimental model before it stopped moving. Sergeant Pound let out a piteous howl from inside the barrel. “Don’t eat your heart out, Sergeant,” Morrell said. “You can come have a look, too.”

He didn’t wait for Pound to emerge, though. He hurried over to the new barrel. His leg twinged under him. He’d been shot in the early days of the Great War. He still had a slight limp almost twenty years later. The leg did what he needed, though. If it pained him now and again . . . then it did, that was all.

“Bully,” he said softly as he came up to the new barrel. That marked him as an old-fashioned man; people who’d grown up after the Great War commonly said
swell
at such times. He knew exactly what he meant, though. He looked from the new machine to the experimental model and back again. A broad grin found room on his narrow face. It was like seeing a child and the man he had become there side by side.

The experimental model was soft-skinned, thin-skinned. One truck engine powered it, because it wasn’t very heavy. The cannon in its turret was a one-pounder, a popgun that couldn’t damage anything tougher than a truck.

Here, though, here was the machine of which its predecessor had been the model. Morrell set a hand on its green-gray flank. Armor plate felt no different from mild steel under his palm. He knew the difference was there, though. Up at the bow and on the front of the turret, two inches of hardened steel warded the barrel’s vitals. The armor on the sides and back was thinner, but it was there.

A long-barreled two-inch gun jutted from the turret, a machine gun beside it. He knew of no barrel anywhere in the world with a better main armament. The suspension was beefed up. So was the engine at the rear. It was supposed to push this barrel along even faster than the experimental model could do.

Sergeant Pound came up behind him. So did the other crewmen from the experimental model: the loader, the bow machine-gunner, the wireless operator, and the driver. Pound said, “It’s quite something, sir. It’s a good thing we’ve got it. It would have been even better if we’d had it ten years ago.”

“Yes.” Morrell wished the sergeant hadn’t pointed that out, no matter how obvious a truth it was. “If we’d built this ten years ago, what would we have now? That’s what eats at me.”

“I don’t blame you a bit, sir,” Pound said. “What happened to the barrel program was a shame, a disgrace, and an embarrassment. And if the Japs hadn’t gone and embarrassed us, too, it never would have started up again.”

“I know.” Morrell couldn’t wait any more. He climbed up onto the new barrel, opened the hatch at the top of the commander’s cupola, and slid down into the turret.

It didn’t smell right. He noticed that first. All it smelled of was paint and leather and gasoline: fresh smells, new smells. It might have been a Chevrolet in a showroom. The old machines and the experimental model stank of cordite fumes and sweat, odors Morrell had taken for granted till he found himself in a barrel without them. He sat down in the commander’s seat. Before long, this beast would smell the way it was supposed to.