In At the Death sa-4 Read online

  Senators and Representatives contemplating the end of the Confederate States cheered even louder than they had before. It wasn't given to many men to be in at the birth of something wonderful. If you couldn't do that, being in at the death of something foul was almost as good.

  Congressmen and — women crowded up to congratulate the President as he stepped down from the rostrum. Flora started to, but then changed her mind. Charlie La Follette would know how she felt. And she wanted to find out what Jake Featherston had to say about his opposite number's speech. She didn't think she would need to wait very long.

  But when she got to her office, Bertha waved a message form at her. "Mr. Roosevelt would like to see you as soon as you can see him, Congresswoman," she said.

  "Is he coming here, or does he want me to go to the War Department?" Flora asked.

  "He called right when the President finished. When I told him I expected you back soon, he said he was on his way," her secretary answered.

  Roosevelt got there about fifteen minutes later. He wheeled himself into Flora's inner office and closed the door behind him. "What's going on, Franklin?" she asked.

  "Well, I'm afraid I have bad news, and I wanted you to hear it straight from me," the Assistant Secretary of War said. "The Confederates landed raiders in Washington State-we think by submersible-and they fired a good many mortar rounds at the uranium project."

  "Gevalt!" she exclaimed. "How bad is it?"

  "They did some damage, damn them. We're still trying to figure out just how much," Roosevelt replied. "Two or three mortar bombs hit one of the dormitories, too. We lost some talented people, and they won't be easy shoes to fill."

  "How close are we? Can we go on without them?"

  Franklin Roosevelt shrugged broad shoulders. "We have to. And we're getting very close. I don't know how much this will delay us. I'm not sure it'll delay us at all. But I'm not sure it won't, either." He spread his hands. "We just have to see."

  "What about the Confederate project? Are we delaying it?"

  "If we're not, it isn't from lack of effort. That town will never be the same, and neither will that university. But they're burrowing like moles, putting as much as they can underground. That's delaying them all by itself. They haven't quit, though. I don't think that bastard Featherston knows what the word means."

  "They won't get another chance to do this to us. They've already had too many," Flora said.

  "Charlie made a good speech there," Roosevelt agreed. "I bet Jake Featherston's mad enough to spit rivets."

  "Shall we see?" Flora reached for the knob on her wireless set. Even after it warmed up, static stuttered and farted as she turned the tuner to a frequency Featherston often used. The USA and CSA kept jamming each other's stations as hard as they could. Richmond's main transmitter, though, punched through the jamming more often than not.

  Sure enough, the Confederate President came on the air right away. "I don't need to tell you the truth, on account of Charlie La Follette just did it for me," Featherston snarled. "The truth is, he aims to wipe the Confederate States clean off the map. Charlie La Follette thinks he's Abe Lincoln. Turned out Lincoln couldn't wipe us out. Old Charlie'll find out the hard way he can't, either. I know the Confederate people won't let the country down. They never have. They never will. And Charlie La Follette will hear from us real soon now. You bet he will. So long."

  He wasn't kidding. At least a dozen long-range rockets slammed into Philadelphia in the next few minutes. One of them missed Congressional Hall by alarmingly little. Flora felt the jolt in the soles of her feet. The rockets didn't announce themselves. They flew faster than sound, so the boom! when they went off was the first and only sign they were on the way.

  After the salvo ended, Roosevelt said, "He can annoy us doing that, but he can't beat us. And we can beat him on the ground. And we are. And we will."

  "But how much will be left of us by the time we do?" Flora asked.

  The Assistant Secretary of War stuck out his chin. "As long as we have one man standing after he goes down, nothing else matters."

  As long as the one man we have standing is my son, nothing else matters, Flora thought. But Franklin Roosevelt had a son in the Navy. Maybe he was thinking the same thing.

  IV

  Major Toricelli stuck his head into Abner Dowling's office. "Sir, you've got a call from Philadelphia."

  "Do I?" Dowling viewed the prospect without delight. "What do they think I've gone and done now?" Calls from the War Department, in his copious experience, seldom brought good news.

  But his adjutant said, "I don't think it's that kind of call, sir. It's General Abell. Shall I transfer it in here?"

  "You'd throw a fit if I said no. So would he," Dowling said. A moment later, the telephone on his desk rang. He picked it up. "Abner Dowling here."

  "John Abell, sir," said the voice on the other end of the line, and Dowling recognized the brainy General Staff officer's cool, cerebral tones. "I hope you're well?"

  "Tolerable, General, tolerable," Dowling replied. "Yourself?"

  "I'll last out the war," Abell said, which might have meant anything or nothing. "I have a question for you: how would you like to come back to the East and command an army in what we hope will be one of the decisive attacks of the war?"

  How would you like to go to bed with a beautiful blonde who's passionately in love with you? Yes, there were dumber questions, but not many. "What's not to like?" Dowling asked.

  And John Abell told him what there was not to like: "Your army-group commander would be General MacArthur."

  "Oh," Dowling said. MacArthur had commanded a division in George Custer's army in the Great War while Dowling was Custer's adjutant general. When MacArthur led an army in northern Virginia this time around, Dowling had commanded a corps under him for a while. The two men didn't get along well-which was, if anything, an understatement.

  "We could use you back in Virginia, sir," Abell said. "You have experience with aggressive offensive action, and you have experience fighting Freedom Party Guards. You'd do the country a service if you came back."

  "And what would I do to myself?" Dowling asked. Brigadier General Abell didn't answer; he had to figure that out on his own. "Who would take over for me here if I left?" he inquired. "Still lots of work that needs doing."

  "We were looking at giving Colonel DeFrancis a star and putting him in charge of Eleventh Army," Abell said. "He should handle it, and his coming from the air-operations side of things would be an advantage on such a broad front. Or do you think I'm wrong?" Is there anything about Terry DeFrancis we don't know? he meant.

  "No, I'm sure he'll do a bang-up job." Dowling had to answer that quickly and firmly, so Abell would have no doubts. "He's a fine officer, and he knows the situation here, so he won't have to waste any time figuring out what's going on. He's young to make general, but wars do that."

  "So they do," said Abell, who, like Dowling, had waited a long time for stars. "I'll see you here in Philadelphia, then, as fast as you can come. Orders will be cut by the time you get to the airstrip outside of Snyder. Take care." He hung up without waiting for Dowling's good-bye.

  "Pack a duffel, Angelo," Dowling called to his adjutant. "We're on our way to Philly, and then to Virginia."

  "Who takes over here?" Toricelli asked.

  "Terry DeFrancis," Dowling replied. "My guess is, his telephone's ringing right about now."

  Sure enough, DeFrancis' auto pulled up in front of Eleventh Army headquarters just as Dowling and Toricelli were ready to leave for the airstrip. "Congratulations on getting back to the real war, sir!" DeFrancis called as he jumped out.

  "Congratulations to you, General," Dowling said. They shook hands.

  "I've got a hot transport waiting for you at the field," DeFrancis said. "It'll take you up to Wichita. I don't know what they've got laid on for you after that, but General Abell sure sounded like he wants you in Philadelphia fast as you can get there."

  Dowling and
Toricelli threw duffel bags with enough personal belongings to keep them going for a little while into a command car. After one more handshake with DeFrancis, Dowling told the driver, "Step on it!"

  "Yes, sir!" The corporal needed no further encouragement. He drove like a bat out of hell-perhaps like a bat a little too eager to go back there.

  The two-engined transport took off with an escort of four fighters. Terry DeFrancis hadn't mentioned that. Dowling was grateful all the same. U.S. air power dominated the skies in west Texas, but the Confederates still got fighters up in the air every now and then. Even a hot transport was no match for a Hound Dog.

  Neither the Texas Panhandle nor western Sequoyah had suffered too badly in the war. The fighting in Sequoyah was mostly farther east, where the oil wells were. Where the oil wells had been, rather. The oil fields had changed hands several times during the war. Whenever they did, the side pulling out blew them up to deny them to the enemy. The conquerors would start making repairs and then have to retreat themselves-and carry out their own demolitions. By now, Sequoyah's oil wells were some of the most thoroughly liberated real estate on the face of the globe.

  In the last war, Sequoyah had started out as Confederate territory. C.S. cavalry raids terrorized Kansas till the USA slowly and painfully overran that state's southern neighbor. These days, though, Wichita was a backwater. The arrival of a major general, even if he was only passing through on his way somewhere else, made airport personnel flabble.

  "Your airplane is ready and waiting, sir!" said the major in command of the field.

  "Thanks," Dowling said. "Where do I go from here?"

  "Uh, St. Louis, sir," the major said. "Didn't they tell you?"

  "If they had, would I be asking?" Dowling asked reasonably.

  He got into St. Louis just as the sun was setting. That was a relief: he wasn't sure they would have turned on landing lights for his airplane. Confederate bombers from Arkansas came up often enough to leave blackout regulations tightly in place.

  At the airport there, they offered him the choice of a Pullman berth on a fast train east or a layover and the first flight out in the morning. He chose the layover. A bed that didn't bounce and shake had its attractions.

  He spent less time in it than he would have liked. The Confederates came over at eleven and then again at two. Instead of a bed that didn't bounce, Dowling got two doses of a chilly trench. Bombs whistled down and burst too close for comfort. He wondered if he would be able to fly out the next morning.

  He did. The raid left the airport with a working runway, and didn't hit the airplane waiting to take him east. On the way, he got a bird's-eye view of what the war had done to the United States.

  Only occasional craters showed on the ground till he flew over what had to be eastern Indiana. From there on, it was one disaster after another: deserted, unplowed farmland, with towns and cities smashed into ruins. How long would repairing the devastation take? How much would it cost? What could the country have done if it didn't have to try to put itself together again? He couldn't begin to guess. That was a question for politicians, not soldiers. But a soldier had no trouble seeing the USA-and the CSA, too-would have been better off without a war.

  Though Dowling didn't see what had happened to the Confederate States, he knew that had to be worse than what he was looking at. "If they were smart, they would have left us alone," he said to Major Toricelli.

  "If they were smart, they never would have elected that Featherston bastard," his adjutant replied. Dowling nodded-there was another obvious truth.

  His airplane landed outside of Pittsburgh to refuel. As it spiraled down toward the runway, he got a good look at what the battle had cost the city. His first thought was, Everything. But that wasn't an obvious truth. Smoke rose from tall stacks-and from some truncated ones-from steel mills that were either back in business or had never gone out of business. Nobody had bothered repairing shell-pocked walls or, sometimes, roofs. Those could wait. The steel? That was a different story. Trucks on the roads, trains in the railroad yards, and barges on the rivers took it where it needed to go.

  When he got out of the airplane to stretch his legs and spend a penny, his nose wrinkled. He'd expected the air to be full of harsh industrial stinks, and it was. He hadn't expected the stench of death to linger so long after the fighting ended.

  "Not as bad as the graves outside of Camp Determination," Toricelli said.

  "Well, no. I don't think anything in the whole world is that bad," Dowling replied. "But this is what the Great War battlefields were like. Most of the ones this time around aren't so foul. They move faster and cover more ground, so there aren't so many bodies all in the same place."

  "Except here there are," his adjutant said.

  Dowling nodded. "Yeah. Except here there are."

  Philadelphia was another bomb-pocked nightmare of a city, another place where factories sent up defiant plumes despite the destruction. A green-gray motorcar met Dowling at the airport. "I'll take you to the War Department, sir," said the bright young captain who accompanied the enlisted driver.

  "How bad are these long-range rockets we hear about?" Dowling asked as the auto picked its way through streets often cratered and rubble-strewn.

  "They sure aren't good, sir," the captain answered. "First thing you know is, they go boom-and if you're there when they do, then you aren't any more."

  That was convoluted, but Dowling got the message. Damage grew worse as the auto got closer to the center of town. A lot of the rockets seemed to have fallen there. Dowling saw the finned stern of one sticking up, and curved sheet metal from a couple of more.

  The War Department had taken lots of near misses but no direct hits Dowling saw. He had to show his ID before they let him in. Even after he did, they patted him down. No one apologized-it was part of routine. The captain took him down to John Abell's office. "Good to see you, sir," Abell said, his usual bloodless tones sucking the warmth from the words.

  "And you," Dowling replied, which wasn't entirely true but came close enough. He pointed to a map of Virginia on Abell's wall. "What are we going to do to them?"

  Abell got up and pointed. "This is what we've got in mind."

  Dowling whistled. "Well, whoever came up with it sure didn't think small."

  "Thank you," Abell said. That made Dowling blink; the General Staff officer was more likely to see what could go wrong than what could go right. This scheme, though, definitely counted on things going right.

  "You really think they're on their last legs, don't you?" Dowling said.

  "Last leg," John Abell replied. "They're standing on it in Georgia. If we hit them here, too, the bet is that they fall over."

  "It could be." Dowling hesitated, then said the other thing he thought needed saying: "Is General MacArthur really the right man to knock them over?"

  "If you want command of the army group, sir, you won't get it." Now Abell's voice was as icy as Dowling had ever heard it, which said a good deal.

  "No, no, no. I wasn't asking for myself. After a question like that, I wouldn't take it if you gave it to me on a silver platter," Dowling said. "But if we've got somebody better than that scrawny bastard handy, we ought to use him."

  The General Staff officer relaxed fractionally. "Since you put it that way…Well, General Morrell is busy in Georgia, which is also of vital importance. And General MacArthur is the man on the spot, and familiar with conditions."

  "All right," Dowling said. It wasn't, not really, but he'd made the effort. "When we're ready down there, I'll do everything I can."

  C larence Potter was so glad to get away from Georgia and George Patton that he almost didn't mind shuttling back and forth between Richmond and Lexington every few days. President Featherston couldn't seem to make up his mind whether he wanted Potter to pick up his work in Intelligence again or act as liaison with the uranium-bomb project.

  Either way, Potter figured he was better suited to the work than he was to commanding a division u
nder Patton. As far as he could see, the only things that suited a man to command a division under Patton were a rhino's hide and an uncanny ability to turn off one's brain. That probably wasn't fair-Patton had grievances with him, too. Potter didn't much care. Not dealing with Patton was such a pleasure.

  Of course, not dealing with the general meant dealing with the President of the CSA-and, incidentally, with Professor FitzBelmont. But Potter had been dealing with Jake Featherston since the Great War, and he scared the living bejesus out of the professor. He could handle both of those jobs without wanting to retread his stomach lining twice a day.

  FitzBelmont was a man facing a problem all too common in the CSA these days: he was trying to do a key job without quite enough men or resources, and with the damnyankees pounding the crap out of him from the air. Back before the United States found out what was going on there, Washington University had been a lovely, leafy, grassy campus. Potter remembered what a joy coming to Lexington had been after the devastation visited on Richmond.

  Lexington was making up for lost time these days. Everything except the uranium-bomb project had abandoned the university campus, which looked like a real-estate poster for a subdivision in one of the ritzier neighborhoods of hell. The slagged and cratered earth might have caught smallpox. Ruins of what had been elegant, graceful buildings, many dating back before the War of Secession, offered a sorry reminder of better times. Only the square, brutal simplicity of reinforced concrete, ton upon ton of it, had any hope of surviving the Yankees' nightly visits.

  Down below that concrete, the pile was turning uranium into jovium, which was what FitzBelmont had christened element 94. Enough jovium would go boom, just like U-235. Making it go boom, though, wasn't so simple.