Every once in a while, he ran into something he really needed to see. When he came to a memorandum from Clarence Potter, he knew he had to read it. For one thing, Potter would give him a hard time if he didn’t. And, for another, even though he trusted the Intelligence officer about as far as he could throw him, Potter had a lefthanded way of looking at the world that was often valuable. By his own lights, Potter was a patriot. Where his lights and Jake’s corresponded, they got on fine.
As Featherston read through this scheme, he found himself nodding. “Yeah,” he said when he was done. “About time we got some help from our so-called allies.” He knew as well as anybody that Britain was heavily bogged down in western Germany, trying to hold on to the gains she and France had made when the war was shiny and new. He recognized the feeling. He had it himself. The problem with grabbing a tiger by the tail was that letting go could hurt even worse than hanging on.
He picked up a pen and started to write. If Churchill wanted to play along, this wouldn’t cost the limeys much-and if it went off well, it could bring the United States untold grief. That wouldn’t break Jake’s heart. Oh, no-far from it.
His big worry was that Churchill was too obsessed with the Kaiser to care what happened on this side of the Atlantic. But the USA was the country that had taken Canada and Newfoundland away from England after the Great War. Winston was almost as good at remembering offenses done him as Jake was himself.
“Lulu!” he called from his office.
“What is it, Mr. President?” his secretary asked.
“I want Major Hamilton right away.”
Major Ira Hamilton hurried into the President’s underground office inside of five minutes. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said. He was tall, thin, and bespectacled; he looked much more like a math teacher than a major.
“Good. Good.” Jake thrust the paper at him. “I need you to put this into our fanciest code and send it to London just as fast as you can.” There was a reason Hamilton looked like a math teacher: up till the war started, he’d been a professor of mathematics at Washington University.
“I’ll do it, sir,” he said. “It doesn’t look too long-it should go out this afternoon.”
“That’ll be just fine, Major. Thank you kindly.” Featherston was far more polite with people who were useful to him than with the rest of the world. Hamilton gave him a ragged salute and hurried away. Someone would keep a discreet eye on the unmilitary major to make sure he did what he was supposed to do and nothing else. And someone would watch the man who watched Hamilton, and somebody would…
Things had to work that way. If you didn’t keep an eye on people, they’d make you wish you had. Jake even kept an eye on Don Partridge. He’d chosen his Vice President because Partridge was the mildest, safest, most inoffensive, and most useless man he could find-and he kept an eye on him anyway. You couldn’t be too careful.
Some of the papers Featherston plowed through were damage reports from the western part of the Confederacy. The damnyankees were trying to knock out the dams he’d built on the Tennessee and the Cumberland Rivers. That infuriated him. It alarmed him, too. The Confederate States needed the electricity those dams produced. It kept factories going. And it changed millions of people’s lives. He was as proud of those dams and what they did as of almost anything else his administration had accomplished.
Almost was the key word there. Ferd Koenig came in a couple of hours later. “Good to see you, by God,” Jake said. “Have a seat.” He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of fine Tennessee sipping whiskey. “Have a snort.”
“Don’t mind if I do.” Koenig took the bottle from him, raised it, swallowed, and passed it back. “Virgin’s milk. The corn that went in there died happy.”
“You better believe it.” Jake swigged, too. Velvet fire ran down his throat. He set the bottle on the desk after one knock. He wanted the taste. He didn’t want to get smashed. “So how’s relocation coming?”
“Tolerable. Better than tolerable, matter of fact,” Koenig answered. “One neighborhood at a time, one town at a time, we clean ’em out. Off they go. They reckon they’re going to camps, and they are. What they don’t reckon on is, they don’t come out again.”
“Towns are all very well. Towns are better than all very well, matter of fact,” Jake said. “But there’s still the core of the cotton country-from South Carolina through Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi into Louisiana. We thinned that out some when we brought in harvesters-got a bunch of niggers off the farms and into towns where we could deal with ’em easier.”
“Got a bunch of ’em with rifles in their hands, too,” Ferdinand Koenig said dryly. “They didn’t have work anymore, so they reckoned they might as well go out and start shooting white folks.”
He wasn’t wrong, but Featherston said, “We had trouble with ’em before that, too,” which was also true. He went on, “That whole goddamn Black Belt’s been up in arms ever since the Great War. Damn Whigs never were able to put it down all the way, and we’ve had our own fun and games with it. Plenty of places down there where it’s never been safe for a white man to go around by himself in broad daylight, let alone after the sun goes down.”
“That’s only part of the problem,” Koenig said. “In towns, you can put barbed wire around the nigger district, and after that you can go in and clean it out one chunk at a time, however you want to. The niggers in the countryside, you can’t cordon ’em off so easy. They just slip away. It’s like trying to scoop up water with a sieve.”
“Gotta keep working on it,” Jake said.
The Attorney General’s jowls wobbled as he nodded. “Oh, hell, I know that,” he said. “But the real trouble is, it takes a lot of manpower, and we haven’t got a lot of people to spare, not the way things are going.”
“I know, I know.” Featherston reached for the whiskey bottle again. More heat trickled down his throat. He’d been so certain he could knock the USA out of the war in a hurry. He’d been so certain-and he’d been so wrong. Soldiers at the front were more important than anything else, even people to help round up the niggers. After yet another swig, he added, “Those trucks that Pinkard came up with can’t handle all the volume we need for this operation, either.”
“They’re the best we’ve got,” Koenig said. “And we don’t have guards eating their guns all the goddamn time anymore, either, the way we did before we started using them.”
“I know that, too, dammit,” Jake said impatiently. “We need something better, though-and no, I don’t know what it is any more than you do. But something. We’ve got to get rid of those niggers in great big old lots.”
“You can figure out damn near anything if you throw enough money and enough smart people at it,” Ferd Koenig observed. “Is this worth throwing ’em at it? Or do we need the people and the money more somewhere else?”
“This is what we spent all that time wandering in the wilderness for,” Jake said, as if he were Moses leading the CSA to the Promised Land. That was exactly how he felt, too. “If we don’t do this, we’re letting the country down.”
“Well, all right.” Koenig nodded again. “I feel the same way, but I needed to make sure you did. We can do that-you know we can. But it’ll likely mean pulling those people and that money away from the war effort.”
“This is the war effort,” Jake Featherston declared. “What else would you call it? This is what counts.” Even as he spoke, he heard the rumble of U.S. artillery fire, not nearly far enough to the north. He nodded anyway. “We clean out the coons, we’ll do something for this country that’ll last till the end of time.”
“All right, then. We’ll tend to it.” Koenig sighed. “I wish we had as many people as the Yankees do. They can afford to keep more balls in the air at the same time than we can.”