“Anything’s worth a shot right now, wouldn’t you say?” Jeff answered.
Ling only grunted. That was probably as it should be. A soldier wouldn’t admit his side was in trouble, even if it was-maybe especially if it was. If he hurt the troops’ morale, what would that do? Cause his side more trouble still. “We’ll see what happens,” Ling said at last, and he did hang up.
“Hooked him, by God,” Jeff said happily as he set down his own telephone. “I do believe I hooked him.” He hadn’t been sure he could.
He looked out through his window at the men’s half of Camp Determination. A long queue of Negroes waited to go into the bathhouse and delousing station. They would go in, all right, but they wouldn’t come out again-not breathing, anyhow. Guards with submachine guns flanked them to either side, to make sure nobody did anything stupid or desperate. Right this minute, everything seemed calm.
The camp was busier than it had been for a while, too. U.S. bombers had eased up on the railroad line leading into Camp Determination. They still hit it every so often, but repairs stayed ahead of damage now. And they’d eased up on Snyder, too. Pinkard thanked God for that. He had his family to worry about, and it mattered more to him than anything else in the world.
As much as he hated to do it, he’d just about decided to send Edith and her boys back to Louisiana. Maybe he would have looked at things differently if she weren’t expecting. But Alexandria was safe in a way Snyder wasn’t. Even though it also had a camp nearby, the United States were in no position to bomb it. If they brought bombers south, they wouldn’t bother with a half-assed target like Alexandria. They’d go and unload on New Orleans, which really mattered.
Jeff watched the queue snake forward. Everything went smoothly. He’d set it up so everything would, but seeing that it did still made him feel good. It wasn’t a guarantee these days. A year ago, all the Negroes who went through the camp believed the guards when they said the bathhouses and the trucks were just procedures to be put up with as they got transferred somewhere else. Not now. The blacks brought out of colored districts and the captured Red guerrillas had a pretty good idea of what went on here. Jeff blamed damnyankees propaganda for that. It made Camp Determination harder to run, because the inmates understood they had nothing to lose.
He breathed a silent sigh of relief when the last Negro moved through the barbed-wire gate and into the bathhouse. That meant he could go back to his paperwork with a clear conscience. It never went away, and it was the part of the job he hated most. He hadn’t signed up to be a bureaucrat. He’d signed up to do things, by God. But you couldn’t just do things, not in the CSA you couldn’t. You had to keep records to show you’d done them, too.
And you had to keep records about things that went wrong. He’d just sent away two more guards from the women’s side for having lesbian affairs with the prisoners, and one male guard who’d got caught cornholing colored boys. Those involuntary separations required a mountain of forms. You couldn’t just fire somebody for something like that. You almost had to catch people in the act, because those accusations could ruin somebody’s life.
One of the women was raising a stink. She denied everything on a stack of Bibles. Jeff didn’t care. He had witnesses to prove she’d been carpet-munching. That was dirty enough when a man did it to a woman (though Pinkard sure didn’t complain when Edith went down on him-oh, no!). When another woman did it, it was about as disgusting as cornholing. This gal had to go, and she would.
She’ll probably end up a girls’ gym teacher, someplace where word of this hasn’t spread, Jeff thought. Under the Freedom Party, records were a lot more thorough and complete than they had been back in the old days, but they weren’t perfect, not by a long shot.
He’d just signed the last of the papers that would get rid of the dyke when air-raid sirens started wailing and airplane engines droned overhead. A minute or so later, the antiaircraft guns around Camp Determination thundered into action. In the camp compound, he watched guards hastily don helmets. Falling shrapnel could cave in a man’s skull.
The colored prisoners, of course, had no helmets. Jeff only shrugged. That wasn’t his worry. If one of the smokes got clobbered, well, so what? It only meant he was buying his plot a little sooner than he would have otherwise.
A thunderous explosion rattled the window in his office. It was safety glass reinforced with chicken wire, but it almost blew out anyhow. That wasn’t a bomb going off. That was a bomber crashing, and its whole load blowing up at once. The gunners didn’t nail very many, but every once in a while they came through.
Prisoners in the yard were pointing up in the sky at the bomber stream. They were cheering and dancing and urging the damnyankees on. Rage ripped through Pinkard. How dared they root for the other side? They deserved everything they were catching, all right. Whether they would have cheered for the United States if they weren’t catching hell from the Confederate States never once crossed his mind.
Not surprising, not when he had other, more important, things to worry about. The bombers started unloading on Snyder again. More antiaircraft guns protected the towns, but flak alone couldn’t keep bombers away. If the Confederacy had some fighters of its own in the air…
But the Confederacy damn well didn’t. Basically, Snyder had to sit there and take it. I will get Edith and the boys back to Alexandria, so help me God I will, Jeff thought. If the damnyankees were going to bomb innocent civilians…Again, he didn’t dwell on what the Confederates had done to innocent civilians on the other side of the border, let alone on what the men he commanded were doing to civilians right here in this camp.
He hated those strings of boom! boom! boom!, one right after another. Sure, Edith and Willie and Frank would be down in the storm cellar. Sure, it would take a direct hit to harm them. The odds against that were long. But it could happen, as he knew too well. And he couldn’t do one damn thing about it. He hated that even more.
Here inside Camp Determination, he was safe as houses. The Yankees had never bombed the camp. They cared more about the worthless niggers inside it than they cared about the honest white people they were trying to murder.
Another bomber exploded. This one sounded as if it blew up in midair. The United States were paying for things today, anyhow. Sometimes the bombers got off scot-free. That was just plain embarrassing. At least the gunners weren’t standing around with their thumbs up their asses.
Jeff knew losing a few bombers wouldn’t keep the USA from coming back. He also knew how helpless he was to do anything about it. What choice did he have but wait here till the raid ended and then go back to Snyder and see if he still had any family left?
None. None at all.
Bombers stayed above Snyder for most of an hour. As soon as the bombs stopped falling, Jeff jumped into the Birmingham that was his to use. He didn’t wait for a driver, but gunned the engine to life and roared off to find out if his family was all right.
He had to go off the road and onto the shoulder a couple of times to avoid craters. He was glad it hadn’t rained any time lately, or his auto might have bogged down. But the fires rising from Snyder made him mutter and curse and pray, all in a confused jumble. He knew what he meant, but he doubted anybody else, even God, would have.
Once he got into Snyder, he had to make more detours, both because of holes in the streets and because of burning buildings. The bombs hadn’t smashed the town’s one fire engine. Its bell clanged like the shrieks of a lost soul as it raced from one disaster to the next. How much good could it do at each stop? Some, maybe.
Jeff’s heart was in his throat when he turned onto his street. A house half a block in front of his had taken a direct hit. Part of a body lay on the front lawn. Pinkard gulped and looked away.