Although Dover hoped not, he wouldn't have bet against it.
"How many niggers in these parts?" Pete asked, not quite out of a clear blue sky.
"Well, I don't exactly know," Dover answered. "I don't think I've seen any, but there could be some skulking around, like."
"Could be, yeah. I bet there are," Pete said. "I bet they get one look at what all we got here, then they light out to tell the Yankees."
"I bet you're right. We saw it often enough farther east," Dover said. "Maybe we ought to do some hunting in the woods around here." He remembered too well the black raiders who'd plundered his dump in Georgia.
"Maybe we should." Pete grinned. "I ain't been coon hunting since I was a kid."
"Heh." Dover made himself grin back. He'd heard jokes like that too many times to think they were very funny, but he didn't want to hurt Pete's feelings.
The hunt was no joke. Jerry Dover feared it was also no success. He couldn't get any front-line troops to join in, which meant he had to do it with his own men, men from the Quartermaster Corps. They could fight if they had to; they were soldiers. They'd had to a couple of times, when U.S. forces broke the lines in front of them. They hadn't disgraced themselves.
But there was a big difference between a stand-up fight and hunting down Negroes who didn't want to get caught or even get seen. Regular troops probably would have had a hard time doing that. It was more than the men from the supply dump could manage. They might have made the blacks shift around. They caught no one and killed no one. The day's only casualty was a corporal who sprained his ankle.
That evening, Birmingham caught hell. The bombers came right over the supply dump, flying from east to west. When the alarms went off, Dover scrambled into a slit trench and waited for hellfire and damnation to land on his head. As the Hebrews in Egypt must have done, he breathed a silent sigh of relief when the multi-engined Angels of Death passed over him, bound for other targets.
He felt guilty about that, and angry at himself, but he couldn't help it. Yes, the Confederacy was still going to get hurt. Yes, other men-and women, and children-were still going to get blown to bits. But his own personal, precious, irreplaceable ass was safe, at least till the sun came up.
He grimaced when he realized just how many U.S. airplanes were heading west. The damnyankees had loaded up their fist with a rock this time. Alabama boasted only two targets worth that much concentrated hate. The bombers' course told him they weren't bound for Huntsville. "Sorry, Birmingham," he muttered.
Birmingham, without a doubt, would be, and shortly was, even sorrier. He cowered in a trench more than seventy miles east of the city. Even from there, he could hear the bombs going off: a low, deep roar, absorbed almost as much through the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet as through the ears.
"Where the hell's our fighters?" Pete howled, as if Dover had a couple of dozen stashed away in the depot.
"We don't have enough," Dover answered. That had been true ever since the front lay up in Tennessee. It was more obviously, more painfully, true now. U.S. factories were outproducing their C.S. counterparts. Dover supposed U.S. pilot-training programs were outpacing their Confederate counterparts, too.
"How're we supposed to lick 'em if we can't go up there and shoot 'em down?" Pete wailed.
Jerry Dover didn't answer. The only thing he could have said was, We can't. While that was liable to be so, it didn't do anybody any good. If the writing was on the wall, Pete would be able to see it as well as anybody else.
The bombers didn't come back by the same route they'd taken going in. When Dover realized they weren't going to, he nodded in grudging respect. The Yankees weren't so dumb, dammit. C.S. antiaircraft guns would be waiting here for the returning airplanes. So would whatever night fighters the local Confederates could scrape up. Maybe Y-ranging gear could send the fighters after the U.S. bombers anyway. Dover hoped so. He was far from sure of it, though.
He wasn't sorry to climb out of the muddy trench. If chiggers didn't start gnawing on him, it would be nothing but dumb luck. Pete came out of his hole at about the same time. "Ain't this a fun war?" the sergeant said.
"Well, I could think of a lot of words for it, but I'd probably have to think a long time before I came up with that one," Dover answered.
"They knocked the shit out of Birmingham," Pete said.
"Can't argue with you."
Pete looked west, as if he could see the damage from where he stood. "You reckon the place can keep going after they hit it like that?"
"Probably," Dover replied. His eyes were well enough adapted to the dark to let him see Pete start. He went on, "Why not? We bombed plenty of Yankee towns harder than that, and they kept going. The USA hit Atlanta day after day, week after week, and it kept making things and shipping them out till just a little while before we finally lost it. Hard to bomb places back to the Stone Age, no matter how much you wish you could."
"Well, I sure as hell hope you're right." Pete pulled a pack of cigarettes from a breast pocket. He stuck one in his mouth and bent his head to light it. The brief flare of the match showed his hollow, unshaven cheeks. Remembering his manners, he held out the pack. "Want a butt, sir?"
"Don't mind if I do. Thanks." Dover flicked a lighter to get the proffered cigarette going. After a couple of drags, he said, "If they flatten Birmingham and Huntsville and maybe Selma, not many factory towns left between here and New Orleans."
"Yeah." Pete grunted. "Whole state of Mississippi's nothin' but farms, near enough. Farms and rednecks, I mean. Used to be farms and rednecks and niggers, but I reckon we took care o' most of the coons there. That's one good thing, anyways."
"Let me guess-you're not from Mississippi." Dover's voice was dry.
"Hope to shit I'm not, sir," Pete said fervently. "I came off a farm about twenty miles outside of Montgomery, right near the edge of the Black Belt. Well, it was the Black Belt then. Likely ain't no more."
"No, I wouldn't think so." Jerry Dover left it there. He thought the Confederacy had more urgent things to do than hunt down its Negroes. Jake Featherston thought otherwise, and his opinion carried a lot more weight than a jumped-up restaurant manager's. But if he'd put those coons into factories instead of getting rid of them, how many more white men could he have put into uniform? Enough to make a difference?
We'll never know now, Dover thought.
"You know how many Mississippians it takes to screw in a light bulb?" Pete asked out of the blue.
"Tell me," Dover urged.
"Twenty-seven-one to hold the bulb, and twenty-six to turn the house round and round."
Dover laughed his ass off-that one did take him by surprise. Here he was, his country crashing down around his ears, and he laughed like a loon at a stupid joke. If that wasn't crazy, he didn't know what would be. He didn't stop laughing, either.
W hen Jonathan Moss heard barrels clanking toward him, he feared it was all over. If the Confederates wanted to put that kind of effort into hunting down Spartacus' guerrilla band, they could do it. Moss knew that all too well. So did all the survivors in the band.
"Got us some Featherston Fizzes?" Spartacus called.
"We'd do better trying to hide," Nick Cantarella said.
"Ain't gonna hide from that many machines," the chieftain said, and Moss feared he was right. He went on, "We headin' fo' heaven, might as well send some o' them motherfuckers down to hell."
Moss wasn't so sure of his own destination, but he'd been living on borrowed time long enough that he didn't worry too much about paying it back. An old bolt-action Tredegar wasn't much use against a barrel, but he hoped a driver or a commander would be rash enough to stick his head out for a look around. If one of them did, Moss hoped to make it the last rash thing he ever tried.