“I don’t care about their balls in the air. Those aren’t the ones I aim to kick,” Jake said.
“Heh,” Ferd Koenig said. “Well, I hope we can do it, that’s all.” He was listening to the gunfire from the north, too. He didn’t brush it aside the way Jake did. It worried him, and he made no secret about that, not even to Featherston.
Showing what he thought took nerve. Lesser men had ended up in camps for lesser offenses. But regardless of whether Koenig agreed with Jake’s policies, his personal loyalty was unshakable. Jake could count the people he fully trusted on his fingers-sometimes, on a bad day, on his thumbs-but Ferd always had been, was, and always would be one of them.
“We will.” Featherston retained his conviction in his own destiny. “The show will be starting soon, and we’ll squash ’em flat. You’ll see.”
“Expect I will.” Koenig didn’t say one way or the other. He didn’t even leave it hanging in the air. He believed in Jake’s destiny, too. He’d gone on believing in it through the black years in the middle twenties, when so many others wrote Jake and the Freedom Party off. He asked, “You need me for anything else?”
“Don’t think so,” Jake answered. “But we do need some kind of way to get rid of more niggers faster. You put some bright boys on that and see what they can come up with.”
“Right.” Ferdinand Koenig heaved himself out of his chair and headed for the door. Jake had no idea what he would come up with or even if he would come up with anything, but had no doubt he would look, and look hard. If you looked hard enough, you generally found something.
Muttering, Jake went back to looking through his paperwork. He wished he thought he would find anything else important, or even something interesting, in there. “Fat chance,” he muttered. “Fat fucking chance.” He made sure he kept his voice down; Lulu didn’t like to hear him swear. That didn’t always stop him, but it did a good part of the time.
And then he turned up a report from an outfit called the Huntsville Rocket Society. He wondered how the hell anything that bizarre had made it onto his desk. Then he saw why. The brigadier general in charge of air defense of Alabama and Mississippi endorsed it, writing, However startling these claims sound, I believe they can be made real soon enough to prove useful in the present conflict.
">That made Jake read it more carefully than he would have otherwise. “Son of a bitch,” he murmured halfway through. “Son of a bitch. Wouldn’t that be something if they could?”
VIII
As the weather heated up, the POW camp near Andersonville, Georgia, did an increasingly good impression of hell. With the heat came humidity. With the humidity came thunderstorms that awed Jonathan Moss. The red dirt in the camp turned to something not a great deal thicker than tomato soup after one of those downpours.
And the mosquitoes came. Moss had known mosquitoes up in Canada, too. These seemed a larger and more virulent breed. He slapped and swore and itched. He was anything but the only one. Nick Cantarella said, “This one I smashed last night, you could hang machine guns under its wings and go to war in it.”
“Who says they don’t?” Moss answered. “That would account for the size of some of the bites I’ve got.”
The other officer laughed. “You’re a funny guy, Major.”
“Funny like a crutch,” Moss said, and then, “Colonel Summers ought to do something about it. We could all come down with yellow fever.”
“Do what?” Cantarella asked in reasonable tones. “Moses parted the Red Sea, but all he did was plague the Egyptians with bugs. God was the one who had to call ’em off.”
Patiently, Moss answered, “Moses couldn’t ask for bug repellent and Flit. Come to think of it, Pharaoh couldn’t, either. But Summers damn well can.”
“Oh.” Cantarella looked foolish. “Well, yeah.”
Moss didn’t ask him how escape efforts were going. He assumed they were still going. He also assumed that much rain did tunnels no good. He looked out the window, out beyond the barbed wire. Even if the prisoners did get out of the camp, could they cross several states and get back to the USA? They spoke with an accent very different from the locals’. They would be pursued-he pictured bloodhounds straight out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And the people they met-the white ones, anyhow-would be Freedom Party fanatics. Put that all together and staying in the camp started to seem the better bargain.
But life here was no picnic, either. And prisoners of war had a duty to escape. Moss knew he’d run if and when he found a chance. As for what would happen after that… He’d worry about such things when he had to, not before.
In due course, citronella candles appeared in the prisoners’ barracks. They filled the air with a spicy, lemony scent as they burned. The odor was alleged to discourage mosquitoes. Maybe Moss got bitten a little less often after that. On the other hand, maybe he didn’t. He wasn’t convinced, one way or the other.
Guards went through the camp with spray pumps. The mist that came out of them smelled something like mothballs and something like gasoline. Moss had no idea what it did to mosquitoes. It made him want to wear a gas mask. Since he didn’t have one, he just had to put up with it.
Again, he wasn’t sure how much difference the spraying made. The bugs didn’t disappear, however much he wished they would. Of course, nobody was spraying outside the camp. Even if mosquitoes died by the thousands inside the barbed wire, plenty of replacements flew on in to sample the flavor delights of prisoner of war on the hoof.
Colonel Summers, once prodded, kept right on complaining, both to the Confederate authorities and to his fellow prisoners. “What they really need to do is spray a thin film of oil over every pond and puddle they can find,” he said. “That would kill the mosquito larvae, and then we really might get some relief.”
“Well, why don’t they?” Moss said. “It wouldn’t just benefit us. Their own health would get better, too.” He thought like the attorney he was, weighing advantages and disadvantages.
Summers only shrugged. “They say they haven’t got the manpower for it.”
“In a way, that’s good news,” Moss said. “If they’re stretched too thin to take care of important things behind the lines, pretty soon they’ll be stretched too thin to take care of things at the front.” Like a lawyer-and like a prisoner-he bent reality so it looked better than it really was.
“That hasn’t happened yet.” Colonel Summers brought him back to earth with a dose of the current news.
“Are you sure, sir?” Moss asked. “Anything you see in the papers the guards give us is just so much Freedom Party garbage.”
“I’m sure.” And Summers sounded very sure indeed. Moss knew there were a couple of clandestine wireless sets in the camp. He knew no more than that, which was a good thing for all concerned. He looked around the barracks. Two or three of the men were new fish, new officers for whom nobody here could vouch. They probably came from the United States. They talked as if they did. But good Confederate spies would sound like Yankees. The less Summers said while they were around, the better.
Machine-gun fire woke Moss in the middle of the night not quite a week later. His first reaction was fury. They’d pulled off an escape attempt, and they hadn’t included him. His second reaction was despair. If the guards were shooting, the attempt couldn’t have amounted to much. Was this the best his countrymen could do?
He got very little sleep the rest of the night.
At roll call the next morning, the Confederate guards swaggered and strutted like pouter pigeons. “Damn niggers came sniffin’ round the camp last night,” one of them said. “We drove ’em off, though-you better believe it.”