Return Engagement Read online

  "I hope all the cocksuckers in there roast," Armstrong snarled.

  Several other men nodded or wished something even worse on the Confederate fliers. "Shitheads didn't even declare war on us," someone said.

  "Well, what do you think?" another soldier asked. "You think we're at war with them now–or shall we invite 'em in for tea?"

  Armstrong kept hoping this was a nightmare from which he'd wake up. The hope kept getting dashed, again and again and again. The bombers didn't linger overhead very long–they must have had other targets besides Fort Custer. It only seemed like forever, or ten minutes longer. As the bombs started falling somewhere else, Armstrong came out of the trench and looked around.

  Nothing was left of the barracks except burning rubble. Several other buildings were also on fire. So were autos and trucks. Bomb craters made the paths and lawns resemble what people with high foreheads said the surface of the moon was like. Armstrong didn't know much about that. He did know it was the biggest, most godawful mess he'd ever seen in his life. His mother and his granny had gone on and on about what Washington, D.C.–his home town–was like during the Great War. He hadn't taken them too seriously. He didn't remember such things, after all. But now, with a convert's sudden zeal, he believed.

  "Who the hell is that?" One of the other men pointed at somebody walking in out of the predawn darkness.

  The newcomer wore coveralls of an unfamiliar cut. Even by the light of blazing buildings and vehicles, Armstrong could see the coveralls were the wrong color, too. The stranger had a pistol on his hip, but he didn't try to use it. Instead, he raised his hands above his head. "Reckon y'all got me," he drawled, sounding cheerful enough. "Isn't much point for a flyin' man to go on with the fight once his airplane goes down, now is there?"

  Just hearing that Southern accent made Armstrong wish he had a gun handy. The bastard thought he could murder U.S. soldiers and then bail out of the war as easily as he'd bailed out of the bomber? Growling like an angry dog, Armstrong took a couple of steps toward him.

  A rock sailed out of the darkness and caught the Confederate airman above the ear. In the firelight, he looked absurdly surprised. As he started to crumple, he tried to get the pistol out of the holster. He couldn't. His hands didn't seem to remember what they were supposed to do.

  And it probably wouldn't have made any difference anyway. Armstrong and eight or ten others rushed him. He wouldn't have been able to hold on to the gun for more than a heartbeat. He might have shot one of the U.S. soldiers, or two, but after that. . . . After that, he would have been a dead man. Which he was anyway.

  By the time the soldiers finished pounding and kicking and stomping, he didn't look anything like a man any more. He resembled nothing so much as a large broken doll lying there on the grass, all of its limbs bent in directions impossible in nature. His neck had an unnatural twist in it, too.

  A corporal came up right after the recruits realized the flier had no more sport left in him. "Jesus Christ, you bastards, what the hell did you go and do?"

  "Gave this asshole what he deserved," Armstrong answered. Morning twilight was beginning to paint the eastern sky with gray.

  "Well, yeah." The noncom stared at the crumpled corpse. "But do you know how much of a stink there'll be if the Confederates find out what the hell you did? They're liable to start doing the same thing to our guys, too."

  Armstrong hadn't thought of that. It was the only reason he could imagine for regretting what he'd just helped do. He would have rid the world of ten or a hundred Confederates as cheerfully, if only he'd got his hands on them.

  One of the other men who'd mobbed the flier said, "Hell with it, Corporal. We'll throw the motherfucker in the trench where the bomb hit, toss his clothes on the fire, and bury the pistol somewhere. After that, who's gonna know?"

  After a little thought, the soldier with two stripes on his sleeve nodded. "All right. That's about the best we can do now, I guess. Get the identity disk off from around his neck, too, and bury it with the piece. That way, people will think he was one of ours when they deal with the bodies." He came closer and took a long look at the dead Confederate. "Fuck! Nobody'll recognize him, that's for sure."

  "It's a war, Corporal," Armstrong said. "You wanted us to give him a big kiss when he came in here with that shit-eating grin on his face? We kissed him, all right. We kissed him good-bye." The noncom waved for him and the others to take care of the body. They did. The corporal didn't do any of the work himself. That was what having those stripes on his sleeve meant.

  ****

  BRIGADIER GENERAL Clarence Potter had spent three years up near the front in the Great War. He hadn't had to do a lot of actual fighting; he'd been in Intelligence with the Army of Northern Virginia. He was in Intelligence still–or rather, after close to twenty years out of the Confederate Army, in Intelligence again–but wished he could get up to the front once more instead of being stuck in Richmond.

  A tall, well-made man in his mid-fifties, Potter had close-cropped hair now closer to white than to its original dark brown. His cold gray eyes surveyed the world from behind steel-rimmed spectacles. The spectacles, these days, were bifocals. That had annoyed him when he first got them. By now, he was used to them and took them for granted.

  A telephone on his desk rang. "Potter speaking," he said briskly. His accent was clipped and Yankeelike. He'd gone to college at Yale, and the way of speaking up there had stuck. That made some of his fellow Confederates look at him suspiciously. It also made him and those like him valuable in intelligence work. The CSA and USA spoke the same language, with minor differences in accent and vocabulary. A man from the Confederate States who could sound as if he came from the United States made a valuable spy.

  A man from the United States who could sound as if he came from the Confederate States . . . was somebody else's worry to hunt down, though Potter had been the one who first realized such a man might pose problems.

  "Good morning, General. Saul Goldman," said the voice on the other end of the line.

  Potter came alert at once. "What can I do for you, Mr. Goldman?" he asked. The little Jew held an innocuous-sounding title: Director of Communications. But he was a force to be reckoned with in the Featherston administration. He shaped the news that went out over the wireless, in newspapers, and in cinema newsreels. His wireless station here in Richmond had helped Jake Featherston rise, and Featherston, who never forgot an enemy, also never forgot a friend.

  The only problem being, he hasn't got many friends. Considering what a charming fellow he is, it's no surprise, either, Potter thought. He didn't count himself among that small group. Five years earlier, he'd come to Richmond with a pistol in his pocket, intending to rid the CSA of Jake Featherston once for all. Instead, he'd ended up shooting a black frankfurter seller who had the same idea but who sprayed bullets around so wildly, he endangered everybody near him–including Potter.

  Memory blew away like a dandelion puff on the breeze as Goldman answered, "I would like to know how I can give your outfit the attention it deserves. I want the people to understand we're doing everything we can to find out what the Yankees are up to and to stop it."

  "You want to give us the attention we deserve, eh?" Potter said. "Well, I can tell you how to do that in one word."

  "Tell me, then, General," Goldman said.

  "Don't."

  "But–" Saul Goldman wasn't a man who usually spluttered, but he did now. "We need to show the people–"

  "Don't," Potter repeated, this time cutting him off. "D-O-N-apostrophe-T, don't. Anything you tell us, you tell the damnyankees, too. Now you may want Joe Dogberry from Plains, Georgia, to be sure we're a bunch of clever fellows. That's fine, when it's peacetime. When it's war, though, I want the United States to be sure we're a pack of goddamn idiots."

  "This is not the proper attitude," Goldman said stiffly.

  "Maybe not from the propaganda point of view. From the military point of view, it sure as hell is." Potter didn't li
ke defying the director of communications. But, Intelligence to his bones, he liked the idea of giving away secrets even less.

  Unlike the swaggering braggarts who made up such a large part of the Freedom Party, Saul Goldman was always soft-spoken and courteous. When he said, "I guess I'll have to take it up with the President, then," a less alert man might not have recognized that as a threat.

  "You do what you think you have to do, Mr. Goldman," Potter said. "If President Featherston gives me an order . . ." He decided not to say exactly what he'd do then. Better to keep his choices open.

  "You'll hear from me–or from him. Good-bye." Saul Goldman hung up.

  Potter went back to work. Since the war started, his biggest worry was how to hear from his agents in the United States. Postal service between the two countries had shut down. So had the telegraph lines. Where there's a will, there's a lawyer, Potter thought cynically. He'd managed so far. North America was a big place. Slipping over the border one way or another wasn't that hard, especially west of the Mississippi. Advertisements on wireless stations and in local newspapers along the border that sounded innocent weren't always. If they were phrased one way, they could mean this. If they were phrased another, they could mean that.

  Some of his people had wireless transmitters, too. That was risky in any number of ways, but sometimes the rewards outweighed the risks. Potter knew he was going to be busy as a one-armed man with poison ivy all through the war. The front? He'd be lucky if he saw the sun once a week.

  The telephone rang again. He picked it up. "Clarence Potter."

  "Hello, Potter, you stubborn son of a bitch." That harsh rasp was infinitely familiar all the way across the Confederate States, from Norfolk to Guaymas.

  "Hello, Mr. President. Saul Goldman talked to you, did he?"

  "He sure as hell did," Jake Featherston answered. "I want you to cooperate with him just as far as you can. Have you got that?"

  "Yes, sir. I do. Who decides how far I can cooperate?"

  "You do and he does, together."

  "In that case, sir, you'd better take me out of this job, give me a rifle, and send me to Ohio or Indiana," Potter said. "I wouldn't mind going. I was thinking about that a little while ago. By the nature of things, Saul and I aren't going to see eye to eye about this."

  "What do you mean?" As always when somebody bucked him, suspicion clotted Featherston's voice.

  "Goldman's a publicist. He's got a story he wants to tell, and he wants to shout it from the housetops," Potter replied. "Me, I'm a spy. That's why you put the uniform back on me."

  "That's not why, and we both know it," Jake said. "I put the uniform back on you because shooting you five years ago would've raised a stink."

  "I believe it," Clarence Potter said cheerfully. "If you give me a rifle, though, you've got a pretty good chance the damnyankees'll do it for you."

  "Don't tempt me." The President of the Confederate States laughed. It was not a pleasant sort of laugh. "God damn you, why won't you ever be reasonable?"

  "Mr. President, I am being reasonable–from my own point of view, anyway," Potter said. "I told you: I'm a spy. The best thing that can happen to me is that the bastards on the other side don't even remember I'm here. And Saul wants to shine a searchlight on me. No, thanks."

  "Then you jew him down to shining a flashlight on you," Featherston said. "Whatever you don't want to show, you don't show, that's all."

  "I don't want to show anything." Potter did his best to keep his temper. It wasn't easy, not when everyone around him seemed willfully blind. "Don't you understand, sir? For every one thing I show, the damnyankees are going to be sure I'm hiding half a dozen more. And the bastards will be right, too."

  "But even if you don't show anything, the Yankees will know you're hiding something," Jake Featherston returned. "You reckon they don't know we've got spies? They're bastards, but they aren't stupid bastards–you know what I'm saying? They might not have your telephone number, but they know where you work. Now you tell me, Potter–is that the truth or ain't it?"

  "Well . . . maybe," Potter said reluctantly.

  "All right, then. In that case, quit your bellyaching," Jake said. "Let Saul take his photos and write his story. If you want to say this is your supersecret brand-new spy headquarters in Williamsburg or something, you can go ahead and do that. I don't mind one goddamn bit. Maybe it'll make the USA drop some bombs on that ratty old place. Nobody'd mind if they blew it to hell and gone, and they wouldn't hurt anything we want to hold on to. How does that sound?"

  Potter thought it over. He didn't like Jake Featherston, and knew he never would. He'd had to develop considerable respect for Featherston's driving will, but he'd never thought the President was what anybody would call smart. Smart or not, though, no denying Jake could be shrewd.

  "All right, sir. New supersecret spy headquarters in Williamsburg it is," he said. "But Goldman will have to be careful taking pictures with windows in them. Now that some of the people I boss actually work above the ground here, people who take a good look at what's in the windows will be able to see it's Richmond."

  "You talk to Saul about that kind of crap," Featherston said. "He'll take care of it. You know your business. You'd best believe he knows his." He hung up.

  So did Potter, slowly and thoughtfully. Featherston had just got him to do what he was told. If I'd pushed it, I could have gone to the front, the intelligence officer realized ruefully. But you didn't push things against Jake Featherston, not when he was pushing on you. Potter knew himself to be no weakling. Featherston had imposed his will even so.

  A young lieutenant came in and dropped eight or ten envelopes on Potter's desk. "These just came in, sir," he said. "Not likely we'll be getting any more like 'em."

  "No, not likely," Potter agreed. The envelopes were from his agents in the USA, and they'd gone to mail drops in the CSA–mail sent directly to the War Department in Richmond might have made U.S. postal clerks just a trifle curious. All of them were postmarked in the last few days before the war broke out. Potter opened one from Columbus, Ohio. "Well, let's see what we've got."

  The agent in Columbus played the role of a businessman. He played it so well, he was getting rich up there in the United States. He'd acquired a Packard and a mistress. While Potter knew about the latter, he didn't think the man's wife in Jacksonville did.

  Codes were crude. The agent wrote that his competition was alert, that the other fellows were sending salesmen down into towns close by the Ohio River, and that they'd ordered more heavy machinery. Potter didn't have to be a genius to figure out that salesmen were soldiers and heavy machinery meant barrels. Neither would any other reasonably suspicious fellow who happened to read the letter.

  But if you weren't suspicious, it looked like an ordinary business letter. So did the others. They all told about the same story: the damnyankees knew something was coming, and they were getting ready to try to stop it.

  Clarence Potter muttered to himself. Had he been running things, he wouldn't have been so belligerent ahead of time. That way, the attack might have been a strategic as well as a tactical surprise. But he didn't run things. For better and for worse, this was and would be Jake Featherston's show.

  ****

  JEFFERSON PINKARD slept badly. In part, that was because the weather at Camp Dependable–not far outside Alexandria, Louisiana–was even hotter and muggier than it was in Birmingham, where he'd lived most of his life. And in part . . . He mostly didn't remember his dreams, even when they woke him up with his heart pounding and his eyes wide and staring. Considering the kind of dreams a camp commandant was likely to have, that made him more lucky than not.

  Camp Dependable wasn't desperately crowded any more. The camp had a limited capacity. The number of black prisoners who came into it from all over the CSA seemed unlimited. Rebellion had smoldered and now and then burst into flame ever since the Freedom Party came to power–and Jake Featherston and his followers didn't believe in turning the other che
ek. When they got hit, they hit back–hard.

  When a new shipment of captured rebels came into the camp, guards led a matching number of prisoners out to the nearby woods and swamps. The guards always came back. The prisoners they escorted didn't.

  The first time Jeff had to order something like that, he'd been appalled. He'd had to do it several times now, and it did grow easier. You could get used to damn near anything. He'd seen that in west Texas during the war, and again in the civil war down in Mexico. But, even though he didn't break out in palpitations whenever he had to do it again, it told on him when he went to bed at night.

  It told on the guards, too, or on some of them, anyhow. The ones who went out on those disposal jobs often drank like fishes. Pinkard couldn't clamp down on them as hard as he would have liked. He knew what they were doing out there. They needed some way to blow off steam. One of them, the very first time, had stuck his pistol in his mouth and blown off the top of his head instead.

  Others, though, didn't seem bothered at all. They came back to camp laughing and joking. Some took it as all in a day's work. And some took it as the best sport this side of coon hunting. When Jeff said as much after the latest operation, one of those fellows grinned at him and said, "Hell, it is coon hunting, ain't it?"

  "Funny, Edwards. Funny like a goddamn crutch," Pinkard had answered. But a lot of the returning guards thought it was the funniest thing they'd heard in all their born days. Pinkard said, "All right, you bastards. Go ahead and laugh. But you better not be laughing and screwing around when you're watching the niggers. You'll be sorry if you are, by Jesus."

  That got their attention. By God, it had better, Jeff thought. Camp Dependable didn't hold political prisoners any more (well, except for Willy Knight, and the ex–Vice President was a special case if ever there was one). These days, the prisoners were Negroes who'd fought against the Confederate States. If they saw a chance, they would rise up against the guards in a heartbeat.

  Pinkard's gaze went to the machine-gun towers rising above the barbed-wire perimeter of the camp. If the spooks in here did try to get cute, they'd pay for it. Of course, they were going to pay for it anyway, so what did they have to lose? Guarding desperate men had its disadvantages.