However proud of themselves they were, their posturing only filled Moss with relief. Nothing inside here had gone wrong. If the guards wanted to jump up and down because they’d beaten back a few sorry guerrillas, they were welcome to, as far as he was concerned.
Later that day, he found an excuse to amble around the grounds with Nick Cantarella. As casually as he could, he asked, “Do we have any way of getting in touch with those colored men on the other side of the barbed wire?”
Cantarella took a couple of steps without saying anything. What he did say, at last, was, “I ought to tell you I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Why?” Moss asked. “They could do us a lot of good if we ever happened to get on the other side of the wire ourselves.”
“Maybe.” Cantarella paused to light a cigarette. It was one of the lousy U.S. brands that came in Red Cross packages from the north. Prisoners could sometimes get the much better Confederate tobacco from the guards. Quiet little deals like that happened every now and again. After the first drag, Cantarella made a face. “Tastes like straw and horseshit.” A moment later, he added, “Want one?”
“Sure.” Moss took one, then leaned close to get a light. The tobacco was bad, but bad tobacco beat the hell out of no tobacco. He blew out smoke and then asked, “How come just maybe?”
The other officer looked around before answering. Satisfied nobody else was in earshot, he said, “For one thing, if the Confederates catch us with them, we’re dead. No ifs, ands, or buts. Dead.”
That was probably true. Moss shook his head-no, that was bound to be true. The Confederate States played by the usual international rules when they fought the United States. They played by no rules at all when they fought their own Negroes. By all the signs, the Negroes returned the favor-if that was the word. Moss said, “But if we’ve got a better chance of not getting caught at all…”
“Maybe,” Nick Cantarella said again, even more dubiously than before. “But why should they help us get back to the USA?”
As if to a child, Moss answered, “Because we’re fighting Featherston, too.”
“Terrific,” the younger man said. “Doesn’t that make them more likely to give us rifles and enlist us? You want to be a guerrilla yourself? I don’t, or not very much. It’s not what I was trained for, but I wouldn’t have a Chinaman’s chance of convincing the smokes of that.” He’d been an artilleryman before he got caught.
“Some of the people here would be good at it,” Moss said. Infantry officers might make the black guerrillas considerably more effective. They really did have training in what the Negroes were trying to do. Moss himself was in Cantarella’s boat. All his military expertise, such as it was, centered on airplanes. He didn’t think the guerrillas would be taking to the air anytime soon.
A flight of a dozen biplanes buzzing along at not much above treetop height made him wonder if he was wrong. Those weren’t military aircraft, except in the sense that any aircraft could be military when you had them and the other fellows didn’t. As if to prove the point, and to show whose side they were on, they dropped bombs on the woods out beyond the prison camp. The explosions set Moss’ teeth on edge.
“Think they’ll hit anything in there?” he asked Cantarella.
“Oh, they’ll hit something,” the other officer answered with an expressive shrug. “Whether it’ll be anything worth hitting… That’s liable to be a different question.”
“Looking like they were just tossing those bombs out of the cockpit,” Moss said. “That’s how this whole business got started, back when the Great War was new.”
“If you say so.” Cantarella wasn’t old enough to remember the start of the Great War. He sure as hell hadn’t been flying then, as Moss had.
A few days later, Moss put the question he’d asked Cantarella to Colonel Summers. The senior officer looked at him as if he’d suddenly started spouting Cherokee. “Trust a bunch of raggedy-ass niggers? You must be kidding, Major.” But for his accent, he sounded like a Confederate himself.
With such patience as he could muster, Moss asked, “Do you know anybody who hates Jake Featherston more-or who has better reason to?”
Summers ignored that. “Besides, Major, we’ve got no way to get in touch with the spooks.” He sounded like a man anxious to close off a subject he found distasteful. He might have been a maiden lady forced into talking about the facts of life.
Moss didn’t laugh in his face, which proved military discipline still held. He did say, “Sir, we have all kinds of deals cooking that stretch farther than the camp. Spread a few dollars around and you can do damn near anything.”
“Not this.” Summers spoke as if from On High. “Not this, by God. No Confederate guard is going to go out and get hold of the niggers for us. That’d be like asking them to cut their own throats.”
He had a point-of sorts. “There are bound to be ways if we look for them,” Moss persisted. “We haven’t even tried.”
“Once we’re outside the barbed wire, Major, you may put your faith in niggers or Christian Science or any other damnfool thing your heart desires,” Colonel Summers said. “Until then, I make the decisions, and I have made this one. Is that clear enough for you, or shall I be more explicit?”
“You are very clear… sir.” Moss turned the title of respect into one of reproach.
Summers heard the reproach and went red. “Will that be all, Major?” he asked in a voice like ice.
“I suppose so,” Moss answered bitterly. “After all, we’re not going anywhere, are we?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Jefferson Pinkard slammed down the telephone and scowled at it as if it were a rattlesnake. “Son of a bitch!” he added for good measure. He slammed a fist down on his desk. His coffee mug and the gooseneck lamp there jumped. He had to grab the lamp to keep it from toppling over.
He’d hated calls from Richmond ever since he started running camps. He had good reason for hating them, too. Richmond had a habit of wanting miracles, and of wanting them yesterday.
Jeff had already given them one-a more efficient, more secure way of disposing of excess Negroes than they’d ever had before. Now that wasn’t good enough for them anymore. He had to come up with something better yet. He hoped the other people who were running camps had got the same call. Let one of them have a brainstorm for a change!
“Fat chance,” he muttered. Some of those people could blow their brains out if they sneezed, goddammit.
He knew the question was ridiculous and unfair. That didn’t stop him from worrying at it like a dog worrying at a bone that was plumb out of meat. How could you get rid of more spooks faster than with this fleet of special trucks?
Oh, you could use more trucks, but that wasn’t the answer Richmond wanted to hear. Richmond wanted something different, something spiffy, something where you could wave a hand and all of a sudden a thousand Negroes weren’t there anymore.
And Richmond needed something like that, too. Pinkard couldn’t very well deny it. All he had to do was look across the railroad tracks at the new women’s half of the camp. Towns were getting their colored districts emptied out one after another. The blacks came into places like Camp Determination. They came in, and they didn’t come out again-not alive, anyway.
How many niggers were there in the Confederate States? How many could the camps dispose of every day? How long would the CSA need to start really cutting into their numbers?
“Gotta be done,” Jeff said heavily, as if someone had denied it. “It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.” Every now and then, the sheer amount of work he had to do tempted him toward self-pity.
He pushed back his chair and got to his feet. He could look out at the camp from the window-no substitute for prowling through it, but sometimes a fast way to spot trouble before it got out of hand. Barbed wire and machine-gun towers separated the administrative block from the seething misery in the main compound. At the moment, a long line of blacks was snaking forward, the skinny men often eager to board the trucks that would, they thought, take them to another camp. In fact, their journey would be strictly one-way. That they didn’t know it, was one of the beauties of the scheme, for their ignorance kept them docile.