Only while Dowling was shouting for Pershing's adjutant did he pause to wonder whether the sniper was still out there, peering through a telescope on his Springfield and waiting for another shot. He was, at the moment, too shocked, too stunned, to worry about it.
Major Corson hurried in. In his outer office, he hadn't even heard the gunshot. Dowling's shouts were what drew him. "Oh, Jesus Christ!" he said, which summed it up as well as anything. "Is he-?" He couldn't bring himself to say the word.
Dowling did: "He's dead, all right. He dropped down like somebody let all the air out of him. He was dead before he hit the rug-never knew what hit him."
Out on the perimeter, soldiers had started shouting and pointing. A couple of them started running. Dowling noted all that as if from a very great distance. In one sense, whether they caught the sniper mattered a great deal. In another sense, it hardly mattered at all. The damage was done, and more than done.
Pershing's adjutant saw the same thing. He got the truth into four words: "So much for normalization."
"Yeah," Dowling said. "We just went back to square one."
"Sir, you're senior officer in the state right now," Corson said. Dowling nodded; the city commandants in both Provo and Ogden were lieutenant colonels. Pershing's adjutant looked to him with desperate appeal in his eyes. "What are your orders?"
You're in charge of Utah. God help you, you poor, sorry bastard. Dowling tried to pull himself together. "Fetch a doctor. It won't do any good, but fetch him. Send men after that sniper." He feared that wouldn't do any good, either, but he had to try. "Call the president and the War Department, in that order. Let them know what's happened. After that, we close Salt Lake City down. We take hostages. We do whatever we have to do to let the Mormons know that if they want to play rough, we're going to play ten times rougher. Have you got that?"
"Yes, sir," Major Corson answered. He saluted and hurried away, leaving Dowling alone with General Pershing's body.
If the Mormons want to play rough, we'll play ten times rougher? Dear God in heaven, had he really said that? He nodded. He had. And, in saying it, he'd sounded a great deal like General George Armstrong Custer. He hadn't wanted to. He hadn't intended to. But he had, all the same. Custer had rubbed off on him after all. And if that wasn't a chilling thought…
If that wasn't a chilling thought, maybe it was a reminder that Custer, for all his enormous flaws-and nobody knew them better than Dowling; a general had no more secrets from his adjutant than a man from his valet-had ended up the most successful soldier in the history of the United States.
I won't keep this command long, Dowling thought. They'll bring in someone with stars on his shoulder straps as fast as they can. Meanwhile, though, it was his. He had to do the best job he could while it remained his.
A doctor dashed into Pershing's office, little black bag in hand. "What do you need, Colonel?" he asked.
"Not me, Major," Dowling answered. "It's General Pershing who's dead." Along with any hope for peace in Utah for God only knows how long.
J ake Featherston strode through the streets of Richmond, his bodyguards surrounding him front and back, left and right. He moved swiftly and confidently, and with such abrupt decision that his turns would sometimes take even the alert guards by surprise, so they'd have to scramble to stay with him.
Richmond was not the city it had been before the war. By now, ten years after the Confederate States had yielded to the United States, almost all the damage from U.S. bombing aeroplanes had been repaired. Even so, something was missing from the city's heart. Before the Great War, everybody in Richmond had known the CSA sat on top of the world.
Nowadays… Nowadays, Richmond felt poor and shabby. Everything looked gray. It all needed cleaning up, hosing down, painting. Nobody bothered to give it any such thing. And the people seemed as gray and grimy and defeated as the town in which they lived. Jake had thought the same thing even before the stock market submerged, but it was much more noticeable now.
He hurried past a man with shoulders slumped from lugging heavy sample cases to firms that weren't buying, that wouldn't have been buying if he'd been selling gold for the price of lead. That luckless drummer was a dead man walking-till he saw Jake. He straightened up. His eyes got back their spark. "Freedom, Mr. Featherston!" he called.
"Freedom to you, pal," Featherston answered. "Hang on. Just remember, we'll lick those bastards yet."
"How?" the man asked. "What can we do?"
"Same thing I've been saying all along," Jake told him. "First thing is, we've got to get rid of the stupid bastards who landed us in this mess in the first place. They aren't fit to carry guts to a bear, but they've been running this country-and running it straight into the ground-ever since the War of Secession. That means the politicians and the bonehead generals in the War Department."
"Sounds good to me. Sounds mighty damn good to me," the salesman said. "What else?"
"Got to pay back the niggers," Featherston said. "Got to get strong again, so we can look the USA in the eye again. Got to get strong, so we can spit in the USA's eye, too, if we ever have to. How do you like that?"
"Me? I like it fine," the man said. "You go on and give 'em hell."
"Just what I intend to give 'em. But I'll need your help, buddy. Remember, vote Freedom come November. We've got to get this country on its feet again. I've been saying that for years. Now maybe people will start paying attention to me." He walked on, leaving the drummer with a last, "Freedom!"
"Freedom!" the fellow echoed.
Back in the middle of the 1920s, that luckless drummer had probably been comfortable enough to vote Whig. Bad times made the Freedom Party grow. Featherston knew as much. He looked around. He'd seen plenty of bad times right after the war, when the money went down the toilet. This… This felt worse. This felt as if the Confederate States were closing down, one store, one factory, at a time, and might never open for business again.
"Freedom!" somebody else called-a woman, her voice high and shrill with worry.
"Freedom, dear," Jake told her. "Everything's going to be just fine." He waved and kept going.
During the war, he'd usually had a pretty good notion of whether the troops in front of him would succeed in an attack-or, later, if they would succeed in holding back the damnyankees when they attacked. Now, after years wandering in the wilderness, he felt things in his own country turning his way again.
Shame it took a panic and a crash to do it, he thought. But that's the way it goes sometimes. If you don't grab with both hands when you get the chance, you deserve what ever happens to you. He intended to grab what ever the times gave him. He'd had one chance, and seen it go glimmering. God damn you to hell and gone, Grady Calkins. That had been the first time. He'd wondered if he would ever see another. Now, here it was again, if he could make it so.
He and his escorting guards rounded a corner. One of them pointed up Grace Street toward Capitol Square. "Look at that, boss," he said. "Isn't it a shame and a disgrace?"
"It's a judgment on the damn Whigs, that's what it is," Jake answered.
Back just after the Great War ended, Capitol Square had been full of soldiers fresh out of the Army. They'd had nowhere to go and nothing to do, so they'd camped there, many of them still with their weapons-enough to make the police leery of trying to clear them out, anyhow, even though they'd rioted more than once.
Now tents and shanties sprouted in the square once more. Jake didn't know who all was in them. Some veterans, certainly. But some men who weren't, and a lot of women and kids, too. People who'd lost jobs and lost their homes or couldn't pay the rent on a flat any more