"I don't think they could have-it wouldn't have been easy, anyhow," Abell said. "We search autos and trucks before we let them in here. Auto bombs are bad enough, but put a couple of tons of high explosive in a truck…" He didn't finish, or need to. "One of those was plenty to make us clamp down."
"Good for you, then. You just saved the President and Congress and us. I mean, I hope you did." Morrell told him about the black rain. "Exactly how dangerous is that stuff, anyway?"
"We'll all find out. I don't know the details. I'm not sure anybody does." Abell looked down at his own soft, immaculately tended hands. "I do believe you were wise to wash off as much as you could. It's like X-rays: you want to keep the exposure to a minimum."
Morrell looked at his own hands and at his uniform, which still bore the marks of those unnatural drops. Were there little X-ray machines in them? Something like that, he supposed. Maybe there were more in the dust in the air. "We sure never learned any of this stuff at West Point," he said.
"Who knew back then?" John Abell said. "Nobody, that's who. Half of what we learned just went obsolete."
"More than half," Morrell said. "New rules from now on."
"If we live long enough," Abell said.
"Yeah. If." Morrell looked at his splotched uniform again. "I think the new Rule Number One is, Don't get in a war with anybody who's got this damn bomb."
"A little too late for that now," the General Staff officer pointed out.
"Don't remind me," Morrell said.
I 'm Jake Featherston, and I'm here to tell you the truth."
This wasn't the familiar studio in Richmond, from which Jake Featherston had bellowed defiance at the world since the days when he was a discredited rabble-rouser at the head of a withering Freedom Party. He had no idea whether that wireless studio still stood. He would have bet against it. Richmond had fallen, but the Confederates put up a hell of a fight before they finally pulled out.
Portsmouth, Virginia, then. It wasn't where Featherston wanted to be-he'd always wanted to broadcast in triumph from Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. And I will yet, goddammit, he thought savagely. But Portsmouth would have to do for now. The station had a strong signal, and somehow or other Saul Goldman had patched together a web to send Jake's words all over the CSA-and up into Yankeeland, too. If Saul wasn't a wizard, he'd do till a real one showed up.
The speech. "Truth is, we just showed the damnyankees what we can do. Just like the Kaiser-one bomb, and boom! A city's gone. Philadelphia will never be the same." He didn't exactly say the uranium bomb (no, from the reports he got from FitzBelmont, it was really a jovium bomb, whatever the hell jovium was) had blown up all of Philly. If his Confederate listeners wanted to think he'd said that, though, he wouldn't shed a tear.
"Maybe St. Louis the next time. Maybe Indianapolis or Chicago. Maybe New York City or Boston. Maybe Denver or San Francisco. Who knows? But one bomb, and boom! No more city, whatever it is."
He didn't say when the next C.S. jovium bomb would go off. He had excellent reason for not saying anything about that: he had no idea. Henderson FitzBelmont didn't even want to guess. U.S. bombers were hitting Lexington harder than ever. Some of the bombs had armor-piercing noses, too, so they dug deep before going off. They were causing trouble.
But the CSA got in the first lick anyway!
"The damnyankees reckoned they had us down for the count," Jake gloated. "They forgot about how much we love…freedom! They'll never lick us, not while we can still load our guns and fire back. And we can."
As if on cue, cannon boomed in the distance. The studio insulation couldn't swallow all of that noise. Some were antiaircraft guns banging away at the U.S. bombers that constantly pounded the whole Hampton Roads area. And others were the big guns from the few surviving Confederate warships, now turned against land targets rather than enemy cruisers and destroyers. The damnyankees were pushing toward Portsmouth and Norfolk by land. Anything that could slow them down, the Confederates were using.
Since some of that artillery noise was going out over the air, Featherston decided to make the most of it. "You hear that, people?" he said. "That noise shows we are still in the fight, and we'll never quit. They say our country doesn't have a right to live. I say they don't have a right to kill it. They won't, either. If you don't believe me, ask what's left of Philadelphia."
He stepped away from the mike. Behind the glass wall that took up one side of the studio, the engineer gave him a thumbs-up. This wasn't the fellow he'd worked with for so long in Richmond, but some stranger. Still, Jake thought he'd given a good speech, too. Nice to find out other folks could tell.
"Well done, Mr. President," Saul Goldman said when Jake stepped out into the corridor. "What a speech can do, that one did."
"Yeah." Featherston wished the Director of Communications hadn't put it like that. What a speech could do…A speech might make soldiers fight a little longer. It might make factory hands work a little harder. All that would help…some.
No speech in the world, though, could take back Kentucky or Tennessee. No speech in the world could take back Atlanta or Savannah, or unsever the divided body of the Confederacy. No speech could take back the rocket works in Huntsville, and no speech could keep Birmingham from falling any day now.
No speech, not to put too fine a point on it, could keep the Confederate States of America from being really and truly screwed. "Dammit," Featherston said, "I didn't reckon things'd end up like this."
"Who would have, sir?" Goldman was loyal. Not only that, he didn't aspire to the top spot himself, maybe because he knew damn well no Confederate general or Party bigwig would take orders from a potbellied little Hebe. The combination-and his skill at what he did-made him invaluable.
They also meant Jake could talk more freely to him than to anyone else except perhaps Lulu. "No, this ain't how things were supposed to work," the President repeated. "Swear to God, Saul, if the Yankees lick us, it's on account of we don't deserve to win, you know what I mean?"
"What can we do? We have to win," Goldman said.
Featherston nodded. He had the same attitude himself. "We'll keep fighting till we can't fight any more, that's what. And we won't surrender, not ever," he said. "If we ever stop fighting, it'll only be on account of we got nobody left to fight with, by God."
The Director of Communications nodded. "You've always been very determined. I knew it right from the first time you started broadcasting on the wireless." He shook his head in wry wonder. "That's more than twenty years ago now."
"Sure as hell is," Jake said. You could see those years in Goldman's gray hair, in how little of it he had left, in his waistline and double chin. On the outside, time had dogged Featherston less harshly. He had lines on his face that hadn't been there then, and his hairline had retreated at the temples, too. But he remained whipcord lean; hate burned too hot in him to let him settle down and get fat. "And you know what?" he went on. "Even if the war turns out rotten, I've had a good life. I've done most of the things I always aimed to do. How many men can say that, when you get right down to it?"
"Not many," Goldman agreed.
"Damn right." Featherston paused to light a cigarette. He didn't like to smoke just before he went on the air; his voice was raspy enough anyway. "The folks who live down here after this war is over, whoever the hell they turn out to be, they won't have to worry about nigger trouble ever again, no matter what. And that's thanks to me, goddammit." He jabbed a thumb at his own chest.