Drive to the East Page 3

  ****

  For quite a while after rejoining the Confederate Army, Brigadier General Clarence Potter had worked underground, in War Department offices that officially didn’t exist. Intelligence tended to get quartered in places like that. For one thing, it was supposed to be secret. For another, if you didn’t have to look at spies, you could use what they gave you and still pretend to yourself that your hands were clean.

  When he got the wreath around his three stars that meant promotion to general’s rank, he also got his unfortunate predecessor’s upstairs office. Being able to look out at Richmond instead of just walls was very nice. That is, it had been very nice till U.S. bombers started coming over Richmond in large numbers.

  These days, only the foolhardy and those who had no choice worked above ground in the heart of the city. A lot of War Department operations had moved to the suburbs. Those that couldn’t had gone underground. Potter’s new office was only a few doors down from the one he’d had as a colonel. Returning to the subbasement, he’d displaced a captain, not the colonel who had the old room. As long as the electricity kept working, he could get the job done.

  He stared at the papers on his desk through the bottoms of his bifocals. He was an erect, soldierly-looking man, nearer sixty than fifty, with iron-gray hair, a stern expression, and the same style of steel-rimmed glasses he’d worn as a major in Intelligence in the Army of Northern Virginia during the Great War (they hadn’t been bifocals then). The spectacles softened what would otherwise have been some of the coldest gray eyes anyone ever owned.

  One of the reasons he glowered at those papers was that they should have got to him weeks before they did. Before the shooting started, he’d run Confederate espionage operations in the USA. Two countries hardly separated by language made spying here easier in many ways than it was in Europe. Some Confederate operatives had been in place in Washington and Philadelphia and elsewhere since before the Great War.

  There were two problems with that. Shooting and moving armies and closed ordinary channels of mail and telegraphy made it harder for information to get across the border—which was why these papers were so late. The other problem was, what were the damnyankees doing in the CSA? Ease of spying cut both ways, worse luck.

  Formally, counterintelligence was on Brigadier General Cummins’ football field, not his. He wasn’t sorry about that, or most of him wasn’t. Even guzzling coffee as if they’d outlaw it day after tomorrow, he did have to sleep every once in a while. He didn’t see how he could conjure up enough extra hours in the day to do a proper job if more responsibility landed on his head.

  Jake Featherston and Nathan Bedford Forrest III, the head of the Confederate General Staff, thought he could handle it if he had to. He had a hard time quarreling with either of them, because they both had more in their laps than he did. But he was a relentless perfectionist in ways they weren’t, and couldn’t let go of things till they were exactly as he wanted them. He had enough insight to understand that that wasn’t always a desirable character trait. Understanding it and being able to do anything about it were two different things.

  Someone knocked on the door. Down here, the rule was that you didn’t walk in till you were invited. Potter checked to make sure nothing sensitive was out in the open before he said, “Come in.”

  “Thank you.” It was Nathan Bedford Forrest III. Potter started to come to attention; Forrest waved him back into his chair before the motion was well begun, saying, “Don’t bother with that silly nonsense.” The great-grandson of the cavalry raider in the War of Secession had a fleshier face than his famous ancestor, but his eyes, hooded under strong dark brows, proclaimed the relationship.

  “Good morning, sir, or afternoon, or whatever time of day it is out there,” Potter said. “What can I do for you?”

  Instead of answering right away, Forrest cocked his head to one side, an odd sort of smile on his face. “I purely love to listen to you talk, General—you know that?”

  “You may be the only person in the Confederate States who does,” Potter answered. He’d gone to college up at Yale before the Great War. U.S. speech patterns and accent had rubbed off on him, not least because even then the Yankees had made things hard for Confederates in their midst. He’d wanted to fit in there, and he had—and he’d had a certain amount of trouble fitting into his own country ever since.

  “But I know how useful it is to be able to talk like that,” Forrest said.

  Quite a few of the C.S. spies Potter ran in the USA were Confederates who’d been raised or educated on the other side of the border. Sounding like a damnyankee helped a lot. It made real Yankees believe you were what you said you were, and was often more convincing than the proper papers. If you sounded right, you might never have to show your papers.

  With a sour chuckle, Potter said, “It’s almost got me shot for a spy here a few times.”

  “Well, that’s some of what I want to talk to you about.” Nathan Bedford Forrest III sank into the chair in front of Potter’s desk. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket of his butternut tunic, stuck one in his mouth, and offered Potter the pack. After Potter took one, Forrest lit them both.

  They smoked for a couple of drags apiece. Potter knocked ash into a brass astray on the desk. He said, “If you think you’ve intrigued me . . . you’re right, dammit.”

  The chief of the General Staff grinned at him, unabashed. “I hoped I might, to tell you the truth. I’m getting up a volunteer battalion I’m going to want you to help me vet.”

  “Are you? A battalion of our people who can sound like damn-yankees?” Potter asked. Forrest nodded. Potter sucked in smoke till the coal at the end of his cigarette glowed a furious red. After he let it out, he aimed another question at his superior: “Are you putting them in U.S. uniforms, too?”

  Nathan Bedford Forrest III didn’t jump. Instead, he froze into immobility. He clicked his tongue between his teeth after fifteen seconds or so of silence. “Well, General,” he said at last, “you didn’t get the job you’ve got on account of you’re a damn fool. If I didn’t know that already, you just rubbed my nose in it like I’m a puppy getting house-trained.”

  “If they’re captured in enemy uniform, the United States will shoot them for spies,” Potter said. “We won’t be able to say boo about it, either. Under the laws of war, they’ll have the right.”

  “I understand that. Everybody who goes forward with this will understand it, too,” Forrest answered. “You have my word on that, General. I already told you once, this is a project for volunteers.”

  “All right,” Potter said. “But I did want to remind you. As a matter of fact, for something like that I was obliged to remind you. So where exactly do I fit in?”

  “You’re the fellow who’s been running people who can sound like damnyankees and act like damnyankees.” Forrest stubbed out his smoke and reached for the pack to have another one. When he offered it to Potter this time, Potter shook his head. The chief of the General Staff lit up again. He sucked in smoke, then continued, “If they can be halfway convincing to you, they’ll be good enough to convince the enemy, too.”

  “It’s not just accent.” Potter scratched his chin as he thought. “You can get away with flattening out the vowels some. Even swallowing r’s might make the Yankees think you’re from Boston or somewhere up there—what even the Yankees call a Yankee. But some things will kill you if the USA hears ’em coming out of your mouth.”

  “Banknote is one,” Forrest said. “I know they say bill instead.”

  “Just about everybody knows that one—just about everybody thinks about money a good deal,” Potter agreed. Nathan Bedford Forrest III laughed, though Potter hadn’t been kidding, or not very much. He went on, “They don’t say tote up there, either—it’s carry. And they mostly say bucket instead of pail, though you might get by with that one. You won’t ever get away with windscreen; they always say windshield. They might think somebody who says windscreen is an Englishman,
but that won’t help anybody in a U.S. uniform much, either.”

  “No, not hardly.” Forrest laughed once more: a grim laugh.

  “What will you be using them for?” Potter quickly held up his right hand. “No, don’t tell me. Let me figure it out.” He thought for a little while, then nodded—at least as much to himself as to his superior. “Infiltrators. They have to be infiltrators. Get them behind the lines, giving false directions, sabotaging vehicles, putting explosives in ammunition dumps, and they’ll be worth a lot more than a battalion of ordinary men.”

  Again, Forrest gave him a careful once-over before speaking. When he did, he said, “Shall I put you in an operational slot, Potter? If you want your own division, it’s yours for the asking.”

  “I think I can do the damnyankees more harm right where I am, sir,” Potter replied. Nathan Bedford Forrest III didn’t argue with him. He thought a bit more. “Do you know what the really elegant part of the scheme is? As soon as the damnyankees realize we’ve got men behind their lines like that, nobody in a green-gray uniform will trust anybody he doesn’t know. And that’ll last for the rest of the goddamn war.”

  Forrest slowly nodded. He looked like a man trying to show nothing on his face at a poker table. Did that mean he or whoever’d come up with the notion hadn’t thought so far ahead? Potter would have bet it did. He almost asked, but checked himself. That might have looked like showing off.

  One other thing did occur to him, though: “You know they’ll do the same thing to us? They just about have to, if for no other reason than to make us as scared of our own shadows as they will be.”

  “I’ll . . . take that up with the President,” Forrest said. Were the raiders in Yankee uniform Jake Featherston’s idea? Potter wouldn’t have been surprised; Featherston had a genius for making trouble in nasty ways. He also had the gifted amateur’s problem of not seeing all the consequences of his troublemaking.

  This long war, for instance. He really thought Al Smith would make peace. Potter muttered unhappily. If only the Yankees would have quit. Jake Featherston would have gone down in history then, no doubt about it. Things wouldn’t be so easy now. He asked Forrest, “What do you think of Charlie La Follette?”

  “We’ll just have to see,” the chief of the General Staff replied. “So far, he sounds like Smith. But who knows what he’ll be like once he gets out from under the other fellow’s shadow? How about you? You probably know more about him than I do.”

  “I doubt it. Who pays attention to the Vice President?” Potter said, and Forrest laughed, again for all the world as if he’d been joking. He went on, “I think you’ve got it about right. Doesn’t look like he’s going to pack in the war.”

  “No, it sure doesn’t. Too bad. It’d make our lives easier if he did, that’s for damn sure,” Forrest said—one more thing Potter thought he had about right.

  ****

  They’d pulled Armstrong Grimes’ regiment, or what was left of it, out of the lines in Utah for a while. The corporal and his buddies had to march away. The powers that be saved most of their trucks to haul men to and from fights they thought more important than the one against the Mormon rebels.

  Marching out meant he and his fellow survivors tramped past the men coming up to take their places in Provo. Telling who was who couldn’t have been easier. The new fish had fresh uniforms, and carried very full packs on their backs. They were clean-shaven. They looked bright and eager.

  Armstrong and the rest of the veterans stank. He couldn’t remember when he’d last bathed or changed his underwear. He was as whiskery as any of the others. His uniform had seen better days, too. He carried nothing he couldn’t do without. And his eyes went every which way at once. They were the eyes of a man who never knew which way trouble was coming from, only that it was coming.

  Most of the soldiers pulling out had eyes like that. The rest just stared straight ahead as they trudged along. The thousand-yard stare belonged to men who’d seen and done too much. Maybe rest would turn them back into soldiers again. Maybe nothing would. The way war was these days, it had no trouble overwhelming a man.

  Some of the veterans jeered at the rookies: “Aren’t you pretty?” “Aren’t you sweet?” “Do your mothers know you’re here?” “Where do you want your body sent?”

  The men going into the line didn’t say much in return. They eyed the troops they were replacing like people in a zoo eyeing tigers and wolves. But no bars stood between them and the veterans. They plainly feared they’d get bitten if they teased the animals. They were right, too.

  “Got a cigarette, Sarge?” Grimes asked. He was a big man—he’d been a second-string lineman on his high-school football team what seemed a million years ago and was actually just over one. Under the whiskers, his face was long and oval like his mother’s, but he had his old man’s dark hair and eyes.

  “Here you go.” Rex Stowe pulled one out of a pack.

  “Thanks.” Armstrong lit up and sucked in smoke. He was named for George Armstrong Custer; his father had been born in the same little Ohio town as the hero of the Second Mexican War and the Great War. Armstrong was born in Washington, D.C., where Merle Grimes settled down and married after a war wound from which he still limped. He’d had a comfortable postwar career as a minor government functionary. He and the rest of the family probably weren’t comfortable now. Washington was too close to the border with the CSA to be safe, though as far as Armstrong knew his father and mother and younger sister were well.

  A middle-aged woman and a couple of little kids stood in the rubble by the side of the track and watched the U.S. soldiers go by. Silent hatred burned in their eyes. Of itself, Armstrong’s Springfield swung a couple of inches toward them. Plenty of Mormon women fought alongside their husbands and brothers and sons. Plenty of kids threw homemade grenades and firebombs—Featherston Fizzes, people called them. You never could tell, even with people behind the lines.

  “They don’t like it that you’re smoking,” Stowe said.

  No mere cigarette could have made them look like that. They wished him straight to hell. If they’d had weapons, they would have done their best to send him there.

  Every civilian he saw looked at him like that. He knew there were people in Utah who weren’t Mormons. The Mormon majority called anybody who wasn’t one of them a gentile. Even Jews were gentiles here. One of Armstrong’s buddies was a New York City guy named Yossel Reisen. He thought that was funny as the devil.

  But a lot of the so-called gentiles had joined their Mormon neighbors in rising up against the USA. Armstrong had trouble figuring that out. What had the U.S. government ever done to them? Had they hated the way Utah was treated so much that they wanted to leave the USA? Weren’t they a little crazy, or more than a little, if they had? Yeah, the rebels were brave, no doubt about it. But bravery had only so much to do with anything when it ran up against superior firepower.

  The rebels were taking a while to lose, because the United States had other things to worry about and weren’t giving them anything like their full attention. But the Mormons and their pals had to be chewing locoweed if they thought they had a Chinaman’s chance of bailing out of the USA.

  Rex Stowe said, “The way things are around here, I don’t even know if I want to come out of the line. Aren’t they likelier to jump us when our guard is down than when we’re looking for it?”

  “Who says our guard’s going to be down? I don’t know about you, but I’m still watching all the goddamn time,” Armstrong answered.

  Stowe considered, shrugged, and nodded. “You’ve got something there.”

  On they slogged, past buildings pulverized in the slow, brutal U.S. advance. Armstrong wondered if there’d be enough Mormons left alive to keep their faith going after this rebellion finally got smashed. There had been the last time around, which struck him as a damn shame.

  He marched for a solid day to get back to the recuperation center that had sprung up in Thistle, southeast of Provo. That put it out
of range of Mormon guns—unless the rebels got sneaky, which they might well do. Barbed wire and machine-gun nests around the center made the place seem like a prisoner-of-war camp, but the guns faced out, not in.

  Once inside the perimeter, Armstrong followed signs to a bank of showers and then to a delousing station. The showers were cold. His father had talked about hot water as part of the delousing process, but times had changed. They sprayed him with something that smelled like poison gas instead of boiling him or soaking him or whatever they’d done in his old man’s day.

  “What is this shit?” he asked the guy doing the spraying.

  “It’s like Flit, only more so. It really kills bugs,” the other soldier answered, and sprayed the naked man in line behind him.

  They didn’t bother trying to get his uniform clean. That would have defeated Job’s patience. They issued him fresh clothes instead, from long johns on out. He felt like a new man.

  The new man got a feed of bacon and real eggs and hash browns and toast and jam. Most of what he’d eaten lately had come out of cans or cartons. This felt like heaven, especially since he could pile as much as he wanted on his mess tray. After about three breakfasts’ worth, he said, “That’s a little better.”

  Rex Stowe had eaten at least as much. “Yeah, a little,” he agreed. “I expect I’ll be able to handle lunch, though.”

  “Oh, fuck, yes.” Armstrong took that for granted.

  Yossel Reisen sat on Armstrong’s other side. He’d also put away a hell of a lot, though he skipped the bacon. He often swapped ration cans, too, so he wouldn’t have to eat pork. He gulped down a big white china mug full of coffee pale with fresh cream. “Damn good,” he said—he was at least as foul-mouthed as anybody else.

  “Ask you something?” Armstrong said to him, and waited for him to nod. “You already did your conscript time, right? And then they sucked you back in?”

  “Yeah, that’s true. You know it is,” Yossel answered. “So what?”