"Yes, Mr. President."
But Goldman didn't sound happy. Jake had artilleryman's ear, and didn't hear so well as he had once upon a time. While he might miss words, though, he was still dead keen for tone. "What's eating you, Saul?" he asked.
"I guess it's the way you put it, sir," the Director of Communications said slowly. "I can see the Tsar talking about Jews like that, or the Ottoman Sultan talking about Armenians."
When nobody flabbled much about the way the Sultan got rid of his Armenians, that had encouraged Jake to plan the same for the blacks in the CSA. He'd said as much in Over Open Sights, too. Because he liked Goldman, he was willing to believe the other man had just forgotten. "The Tsar's a damn fool, even if he is on the same side as us," he said. "Jews are white men, dammit. And so are Armenians…I reckon. Can't talk about those folks the same way you do about niggers. Biggest mistake folks here ever made was shipping niggers over from Africa. Nobody ever tried to fix it…till me. And I damn well did."
Saul Goldman still didn't look convinced. Maybe his being Jewish was finally causing problems after all. His people had been persecuted unjustly. That might make it hard for him to see that Negroes really deserved what the Freedom Party was giving them. If he was getting pangs of conscience now, he'd sure taken his own sweet time doing it. Trains had been carrying blacks off to the camps since before the war started, and Saul's propaganda helped justify it to the Confederate people and to the world.
"C'mon outside," Jake told him. "Maybe you need some fresh air. It'll help clear your head."
"Maybe." Goldman didn't argue. Like anyone who bumped up against Jake Featherston, he'd soon come to realize arguing with him didn't do a damn bit of good.
It was a fine spring day. The savage heat and humidity that would close down soon hadn't yet descended on Portsmouth like a smothering blanket. A newly arrived hummingbird, ruby throat glittering, sucked nectar from a honeysuckle bush. The smell of growing things filled the air.
But so did nastier odors: the stench of death and the slightly less noxious stink of spilled fuel oil. Yankee bombers had been punishing Hampton Roads ever since the war began. They had reason to, damn them; this was the most important Confederate naval installation on the Atlantic coast.
As in Richmond, few buildings had survived undamaged. Not many warships were fit to put to sea from here, either. Salvage crews were clearing a sunken cruiser and destroyer from the channel. That steel would find another use…if the Confederacy lasted long enough.
It will, dammit, Featherston thought, angry at himself for doubting. The sun sparkled off the waves-and off the thin, iridescent layer of fuel oil floating atop them. A moored cruiser, laid up with engine trouble and bomb damage, let go with a salvo of eight-inch shells. They'd come down on the damnyankees' heads soon enough.
A few U.S. airplanes buzzed over Hampton Roads. Jake took that for granted nowadays. C.S. air power did what it could, but it couldn't do enough to hold the enemy at arm's length any more, not even above Virginia. By the sound of the engines, most of the engines were above Newport News, on the north side of the mouth of the James. Antiaircraft guns flung shells at them, but the bursts were too low to bring them down.
Jake pulled a notebook out of his breast pocket and wrote, We need stronger AA. The Confederate States needed lots of things right now. He had no idea when engineers could get around to designing a larger-caliber antiaircraft gun, let alone manufacture one, but it was on the list.
He looked down to put the notebook back in his pocket. That spared his eyes when a new sun sprang into being above Newport News, six or eight miles away from where he was standing. He suddenly had two shadows, the new one far blacker than the old. Slowly, the new shadow started to fade.
Saul Goldman had his hands clapped over his face-maybe he'd been looking the wrong way. Jake stared north in open-mouthed awe, even when a quick, fierce, hot blast of wind almost knocked him ass over teakettle. That toadstool cloud rising high into the sky was the most terrifying thing he'd ever seen, but it had a strange and dreadful beauty of its own.
Goldman took his hands away. He blinked. Tears ran down his face. "I can see you-sort of," he said. "Is…this what we did to Philadelphia?"
"Yeah." Jake's voice was soft and dreamy, almost as if he'd just had a woman. He might not have been able to stop the damnyankees from making their bomb, but in spite of everything he'd finished ahead of them. Both sides had staggered over the finish line. Still, the CSA won first prize.
"Yisgadal v'yiskadash sh'may rabo…" Saul went on in a language Jake didn't know.
The President of the CSA hardly noticed. He'd struck first, and he'd struck at the enemy capital. Newport News? He snapped his fingers. Who cared?
X
I 'm Jake Featherston, and I'm here to tell you the truth." The voice coming out of the wireless set and the boundless arrogance it carried were absolutely unmistakable. The President of the CSA went on, "If the Yankees reckoned they'd blow me up when they dropped their fancy bomb, they reckoned wrong, and they went and killed a big old pile of innocent women and babies, the way the murderers always do."
"Damn!" Flora Blackford turned off the wireless in disgust. Blasting Jake Featherston off the face of the earth was the only way she saw to end this war in a hurry. Blasting Newport News off the face of the earth had its points, but it was only one town among many.
The lies Featherston could tell! To listen to him, the U.S. uranium bomb was designed solely to slaughter civilians. What about the one his men had touched off right across the Schuylkill from downtown Philadelphia? Well, that one was an attack against the U.S. government and military. It was if you believed Featherston, anyhow. Of course, if you believed Featherston there you also likely believed him when he said ridding his country of Negroes was a good idea, when he said the USA had forced him into war, and when he said any number of other inflammatory and improbable things.
If Jake Featherston said he believed in God, it would be the best argument Flora could think of for either atheism or worshipping Satan, depending. She nodded to herself and wrote that down on a notepad. It would make a good line in a speech.
One thing Featherston had said even before the U.S. uranium bomb went off did seem to be true, worse luck: the United States hadn't caught the Confederate raiders who'd brought the bomb north. Flora supposed those raiders wore U.S. uniforms and could sound as if they came from the USA. All the same, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War would have to look into the Army's failure to hunt them down.
But the Joint Committee had something else on the agenda this morning. They were going across the Schuylkill for a firsthand look at what the explosion of a uranium bomb was really like.
As she took a cab to Congressional Hall to meet with her colleagues, she couldn't help noticing that a lot of west-facing buildings had their paint scorched or seared off. On some, the paint had come through intact only in patterns: taller structures closer to the blast had shielded part of the paint but not all.
"They say we blew that Featherston item right off the map," the driver remarked. He seemed healthy enough, but he was at least ten years older than Flora, which put him in his mid-sixties at the youngest.
"It isn't true," she answered. "I just heard him on the wireless."
"Oh," the cabby said. "Well, that's a…darn shame. Don't hardly see how we'll get anywhere till we smoke his bacon."
"Neither do I," Flora said sadly. "I wish I did."
When the cab pulled up in front of Congressional Hall, she gave him a quarter tip, which pleased him almost as much as seeing Jake Featherston stuffed and mounted would have. "Much obliged, ma'am," he said, touching a forefinger to the patent-leather brim of his cap. He was grinning as he zoomed away.