"Well, you Yankee boys, aren't you proud of yourselves?" she said, as if she were waiting for you to get back into bed with her and didn't want to wait very long. She was probably fifty-five and frumpy, but she sure didn't sound that way. "Your brave soldiers went and wiped Hardeeville right off the map."
"Where the hell's Hardeeville?" somebody asked.
"Shut up," said Moss and two other men. Listening to Confederate Connie didn't just remind you why you fought. It reminded you why you were alive.
"That's right," she went on. "They marched into a defenseless town and they murdered everybody in it-men, women, children, everybody. Then they burned it down on top of the bodies. No more Hardeeville, South Carolina. Gone. Right off the map. Some fun, hey? Aren't you proud to live in a country that does stuff like that?"
Nobody could keep the men around the wireless set quiet after that. "Oh, yeah, like the CSA never murdered anybody!" a pilot said.
"Where's your coons, you lying cunt?" somebody else added.
"If they killed everybody, how come you know it happened?" demanded yet another flier.
Confederate Connie actually answered the last question, saying, "The Yankees missed a couple of women, though. They played dead in the blood and then got away. And now, to make you feel good about what your boys in green-gray managed to do, here's a tune by Smooth Steve and the Oiler Orchestra, 'How about That?'"
Music blared from the wireless, more of the syncopated noise the Confederates liked better than most people in the USA did. Jonathan Moss listened with at most half an ear. He wasn't the only one; plenty of people were still telling Confederate Connie what a liar she was.
Moss wasn't so sure. He'd heard enough war stories to believe a unit could go hog wild and massacre anybody who got in its way. He didn't believe troops would do anything like that just for the fun of it. If somebody in Hardeeville had fired at them, though…In that case, the town was what soldiers called shit out of luck. Probably all the men who'd torn up the place wished they hadn't done it-now. That was liable to be a little late for Hardeeville's innocent-and not so innocent-civilians.
A fellow with a bombardier's badge above the right pocket of his tunic said, "What's she getting her tit in a wringer for, anyway? I bet I blow up more people three times a week than those ground-pounders did. But I do it from twenty thousand feet, so I'm a fuckin' hero. It's a rough old war."
Along with the bombardier's badge, he wore the ribbons for a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star with an oak-leaf cluster. If he wasn't a hero, he would do till the genuine article came along. He also had a view of the war cynical enough to give even Moss pause.
The next morning, Moss got summoned to the commandant's office. He wondered how he'd managed to draw that worthy's notice, and what kind of trouble he was in. Major General Barton K. Yount was a sixtyish fellow who might have looked like a kindly grandfather if he weren't in uniform. "Have a seat, Moss," he said. His accent suggested he'd been born somewhere not far from here.
"Thank you, sir," Moss said cautiously, and sat with just as much care. The condemned man got a hearty meal went through his mind.
General Yount must have realized what he was thinking. "I didn't call you in here to ream you out, Colonel," he said. "I want to ask you a question."
"Sir?" The less Moss said, the less he might have to regret later on.
But Yount came straight to the point: "You've flown a lot of different airplanes, haven't you?"
"Well, yes, sir. I started with a pusher job in 1914, and I'm still doing it, so I must have, eh?"
"That's right." Yount smiled and nodded. "How would you like to add a turbo job to the list?"
A crazy grin spread across Moss' face. "Sir, I'd kill for a chance like that. Only reason I haven't is, I didn't know who needed bumping off."
Turbos were going to turn propeller-driven airplanes obsolete as soon as the boys with the slide rules and the thick glasses worked the gremlins out of them. They were already sixty or eighty miles an hour faster than the hottest prop-driven fighters. The drawbacks were unreliable engines and landing gear, among other things. Turbos were widowmakers on a scale that hadn't been seen since the early days of the Great War. Moss was one of thousands of pilots who didn't give a damn. He wanted that chance so bad he could taste it.
Major General Yount's smile got wider. He knew Moss was kidding…up to a point. "You've got it, Colonel. You can call it a reward for a hard time, if you like. There's one thing I do have to warn you about, though."
"What? That it's dangerous? I already know, sir. I'm ready to take the chance."
"No, no." The training commandant shook his head. "I assumed you knew that. But you also have to know that for the time being we aren't using turbo fighters anywhere except above U.S.-occupied territory. If you get shot down or forced to crash-land because of engine trouble, we don't want this machinery falling into enemy hands. You must agree to that before you begin flight training here."
"Oh." Moss didn't try to hide his disappointment. "I wanted to go hunting."
"I understand that. You wouldn't be a good fighter pilot if you didn't. But I hope you follow the reasoning behind the order."
"Yes, sir," Moss said reluctantly. Even more reluctantly, he added, "All right, sir. I agree to the condition."
"Good. In that case, report to Building Twelve at 0730 tomorrow morning. You'll learn about the care and feeding of your new beast."
Several turbo fighters sat on the runway outside of Building Twelve. Moss got there early so he could walk around them before he went in. They looked weird as hell. The fuselage was almost shark-shaped. The wings swept back from root to tip. He'd never seen or imagined anything like that before. The turbos had no tailwheel. They sat on a nosewheel instead, so the fuselage rested parallel to the ground instead of sloping down from nose to tail. The engines sat in metal pods under the wings. Yeah, the new fighter was one peculiar bird. But the longer Moss stared, the more he nodded to himself. It might look different, but it also looked deadly.
He wasn't the only pilot giving the new airplanes a once-over. "Fly one yet?" he asked a much-decorated major.
"Yeah," the younger man answered.
"What's it like?"
"Like your first girl after you've been jacking off too goddamn long."
Moss laughed. That wasn't what he'd expected, but he liked the way it sounded. He went into the building to hear about the care and feeding of the Boeing-71, as the new turbo was officially known. The major doing the lecturing had some fresh and nasty burn scars on his left arm, and walked with a limp. Moss wondered if he'd got hurt in a turbo, but didn't ask. He didn't really want to know. Nobody else seemed curious, either.
He learned about the instruments, about the guns (four 30mm cannon in the nose-one hell of a punch), about the strange and temperamental landing gear, about what to do if an engine quit or caught fire, about what to do if both engines went out (not the most encouraging bit of instruction he'd ever had), about tactics against the Confederates' hottest prop-driven Hound Dogs, about everything he needed to know before he plopped his butt down in the cramped-looking cockpit.
He had to make himself listen. He knew he was hearing all kinds of stuff that would help keep him alive. He was a pro; he understood that. Even so, all he wanted to do was get in there and find out what the bird could do.
After what seemed forever and was only a week, he got his chance in a two-seat trainer. U.S. armies had driven the Confederates out of Petersburg. Birmingham and Huntsville were under artillery assault. Moss wondered if there'd be any enemy airplanes left for him to face when he finally went on duty in the new turbo-people were calling them Screaming Eagles, and the brass didn't seem to mind too much.