Nick Cantarella planted the seed. He and Moss waited to see if it would bear fruit. While they waited, they tramped along. They couldn’t stay anywhere for more than a couple of days; if they did, they started eating the countryside bare. It seemed bare enough to Moss as things were.
“Got a question,” Spartacus said as they marched through a weary night. “You git your hands on an airplane with machine guns in it, could you shoot at the Confederates with it?”
“As long as I have fuel. As long as I have ammo. As long as the motor keeps working the way it’s supposed to,” Moss said.
“You do it in the nighttime, or you have to wait fo’ daylight?”
“Daylight would be better,” Moss answered. “A lot better. I wouldn’t want to try to land in the dark without good airport lights and without somebody on the wireless talking me down. Night flying’s a whole different ballgame.”
“All right.” Spartacus nodded. “Reckon that means we gots to hit at daybreak, so you kin git the airplane up an’ shoot up the town before you lands it somewhere an’ we gits you out.”
“What town?” Moss asked.
“Name o’ the place is Pineview,” Spartacus said. “We’s about ten miles from there now. They got an airstrip outside-reckon we could swoop down on it.”
“Do you want to do that?”
The guerrilla chieftain nodded. “Any way I kin hurt the ofays, I wants to do it. Strips won’t be guarded much. I’s sure of dat. Ofays don’t know we got us a pilot. They reckon we ain’t nothin’ but a bunch o’ dumb fuckin’ niggers. We show ’em. We fuck ’em good-you’d best believe it.”
Later that day, Nick Cantarella tipped Moss a wink. If Moss hadn’t been looking for it, he never would have noticed. He gave back a discreet thumbs-up.
Spartacus didn’t charge ahead without checking. He sent scouts out under cover of darkness to give the airstrip a once-over. They reported a few strands of barbed wire and some sleepy guards ambling around the perimeter. “We kin take ’em out, then?” Spartacus said.
“Oh, hell, yes, boss,” one of the scouts said. The other black man nodded.
Spartacus smacked his right fist into his cupped left palm. “Let’s go do it, then,” he declared. “We gonna make the ofays shit.” All the colored guerrillas who heard that grinned and clapped and whooped. So did Jonathan Moss and Nick Cantarella. If they had reasons of their own that the Negroes knew nothing about…then they did, that was all.
Since the attack on the airstrip outside of Pineview wouldn’t go in till morning twilight brightened the sky, the guerrillas had plenty of time to grab some sleep early in the evening and deploy as soon as the moon went down. Moss had trouble getting any rest. He was always nervous before missions. Cantarella snored like a buzz saw biting into a knot. If he worried ahead of time, he didn’t show it that way.
Flopped down in the dirt, mud smeared on his face so it wouldn’t show, Moss peered hungrily at the airstrip. There wasn’t much to see: a couple of runways flattened with steamrollers, a couple of old-fashioned airplanes at the end of one of them, a sentry with a limp who patrolled this stretch of barbed wire. Moss knew what wire was supposed to be like. This barely counted for a token effort.
“Let’s go,” Spartacus said. Three men with wire cutters slid forward. The strands of barbed wire parted with soft twangs. The men waved. The rest of the guerrillas loped toward the gaps. Someone shone a flashlight toward the rear. The prize pickup with the machine gun in the bed would be coming, too.
“Halt! Who goes there?” A white man spoke in peremptory tones. When he didn’t get the answer he liked, his rifle barked. Moss saw the muzzle flash. Half a dozen answering shots rang out. The sentry screamed and toppled.
“Come on!” Spartacus shouted. “Ain’t got much time now.”
He was wrong. They had no time at all.
Electric lights blazed on, illuminating the advancing raiders much too well. “Get down!” Nick Cantarella yelled. “It’s a-!” Before he could say trap or ambush or whatever he was going to say, three machine guns opened up and said it for him.
Spartacus’ men were caught out in the open on flat ground at short range. The pickup went up in flames before it even got to the barbed-wire perimeter. Maybe some of the Negroes who’d fed Spartacus information did the same thing for their white bosses. Maybe the whites told them what to feed him. However that worked, the result was a massacre.
Moss hugged the dirt. Bullets cracked past hardly more than a foot over his head. The gunners were shooting low, trying to pick off anything that moved. He couldn’t stay where he was, not if he wanted to stay alive. He crawled toward the pine woods from which the guerrillas had come.
Was somebody with binoculars watching them all the time while they advanced? Moss wouldn’t have been surprised. They’d trusted too much, and they’d walked right into the meat grinder. Somebody behind him screamed. Would anyone get away?
“Spartacus still alive?” Nick Cantarella asked.
“Beats me,” Moss answered. “I’m amazed I’m alive myself.”
“Tell me about it,” Cantarella said. “They fucked us good, the bastards. Talk about a sucker punch…”
“I know,” Moss said mournfully. “I was just thinking that. Are we far enough away so we can get up and run?”
“Go ahead if you want to. Me, I’m staying flat a while longer.”
Moss stayed flat, too. Cantarella knew more about this business than he did. Of course, he’d thought Spartacus knew more about it than he did, too. And he’d been right. But Spartacus didn’t know enough to keep from making a disastrous mistake. Even if the leader survived, his band was a shambles.
By the time Moss reached the woods, his knees and elbows were bloody. But he didn’t get shot, so he was one of the lucky ones. Spartacus made it back, too. “Do Jesus!” he said over and over again, his voice and his face stunned. “Do Jesus! What do we do now?”
“Keep on fighting or try and disappear,” Cantarella said. “Those are your only two choices.”
“How can I fight after this?” Spartacus said. “How? Do Jesus!” Neither white man had any answer for him.
The first thing Flora Blackford did when she got up in the morning was turn on the wireless to find out how the war had gone while she slept. The wireless didn’t always tell the truth; she knew that. In the black days of 1941 and 1942, news reports of Confederate advances often ran days behind what really happened. Losses to enemy bombs were minimized, as were U.S. casualties. The uprisings in Utah and Canada had got short shrift-the one in Canada still did.
But, if you knew how to listen, you could get a pretty good notion of what was going on. Today, for instance, the broadcaster declared, “Confederate air raids over Bermuda are of nuisance value only. The enemy has suffered severe losses in terms of bombers and trained crewmen.”
That was true, but, like a lot of true things, didn’t tell the whole story or even most of it. The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War had had some pungent things to say to the generals and admirals in charge of the reconquest of Bermuda. It was back in U.S. hands, but the whole business had proved much more expensive than anyone expected.
Why hadn’t the generals and admirals figured Confederate bombers would keep paying nighttime visits? It wasn’t stupidity, not exactly. As far as Flora could see, it was more like the blind certainty everything would go fine, and an unwillingness to examine ways in which things might not go fine.
To the men on the low-lying ground who had to put up with bombs coming down on their heads, it probably looked a lot like stupidity even if it wasn’t.
Flora made coffee and scrambled a couple of eggs. They were the only ones she would eat this week. She made a point of sticking to the limits rationing imposed on everybody else. Not all Representatives and Senators did, but she didn’t see how government could force such things on the country without observing them itself. Tomorrow it would be corn flakes or toast and jam. She was low on butter, too, but she couldn’t get more till after the first of the month.