And mass graves. Jeff didn’t know what to do about those. He didn’t think he could do much of anything. Oh, bulldozers could cover over all of the trenches, but nothing could dispose of all the bodies and bones.
He got to his feet and stared out at the camp from the window in his office. He looked like what he was: a middle-aged man who’d been a steelworker when he was younger. Yes, his belly hung over his trousers and he had a double chin. But he also had broad shoulders and a hard core of muscle under the weight he’d put on as the years went by.
And he had the straightforward stubbornness of a man who’d worked with his hands and expected problems to go away if you put some extra muscle into them. Not all of a camp administrator’s problems disappeared so conveniently. He knew that; he’d gained guile as well as weight over the years. Still, his first impulse was to try to smash whatever got in his way.
He couldn’t smash the damnyankees single-handed. He’d fought in west Texas during the Great War as a private soldier. Even now, he had no particular clout with local Army officers. His Freedom Party rank-group leader-was the equivalent of major general, but he had no authority over Army troops.
No direct authority, anyhow. He did have friends, or at least associates, in high places. When he got on the phone to Richmond, he didn’t call the War Department. He called the Attorney General’s office. He didn’t love Ferdinand Koenig, who kept piling responsibility onto his back as if he were a mule. Here, though, the two of them were traveling the same road. Pinkard hoped they were, anyhow.
“What can I do for you today?” Koenig asked when the connection went through. He assumed Pinkard wanted him to do something. And he was right.
“Any chance you can get more soldiers on this front, sir?” Pinkard asked. “If Lubbock’s gone, we got us some real trouble.”
“Well, now, you know that isn’t my proper place,” Koenig said cautiously. “I can’t come out and tell the Army what to do.”
“Yes, sir. I know that. I damn well ought to. Damn soldiers won’t listen to me, neither.” Jeff spoke with the resentment of a man who’d tried to get them to move but couldn’t. “But does the President want the damnyankees to take Camp Determination away from us?”
“You know he doesn’t.” Now Koenig spoke without hesitation.
“Well, I sure hope he doesn’t, anyway. But if he doesn’t, we better have the men out here to keep the USA from doing it,” Jeff said.
“We’ve got trouble other places, too,” the Attorney General reminded him.
“Oh, yes, sir. You don’t need to tell me that,” Jeff said. “But we got trouble here, too, and we’re out in the back of fucking beyond-pardon my French-so who ever hears about it? Yankee general hasn’t got much more than a scratch force himself. Some more men, some more airplanes, some more barrels, we can run him right back over the border.”
“I can’t promise you anything,” Ferdinand Koenig said. “I’ll talk to the President, and that’s as much as I can tell you.”
“Thank you kindly, sir. That’s all I wanted,” Jeff lied. He wanted a couple of divisions rolling through Snyder on their way to driving the damnyankees back from Lubbock. He thought Camp Determination deserved to be protected. “Wouldn’t want the United States going on about this place if they grabbed it.”
“No, we don’t want that,” Koenig agreed. “I’ll see what I can do, and that’s all I can say.”
“All right.” Jeff knew he wouldn’t get anything more. He tried to make sure he did get something: “Doesn’t even have to be regular Confederate soldiers. Most of what we need out here is bodies, so the damnyankees can’t just go around us. Mexicans would do the trick, or Freedom Party guards.”
“Won’t be Mexicans,” Koenig said. “The Emperor doesn’t want ’em going into combat against the USA, not any more. Only way the President talked him into giving us more was by swearing on a stack of Bibles he wouldn’t use ’em for anything but internal security. Freedom Party guards, though…” He paused thoughtfully.
Pinkard was a fisherman from way back when. He knew he had a nibble. Trying to set the hook, he said, “This might be a good place to let the guards show what they can do. If they fight harder than soldiers…” He paused, too. The Freedom Party guards were Ferd Koenig’s own personal, private bailiwick. If they fought better than soldiers, or at least as well, then Koenig had his own personal, private army. He might not mind that. No, he might not mind that at all.
He was nobody’s fool, either. If Jefferson Pinkard could see the possibilities, he would also be able to. But all he said was, “Well, I’ll see what the President wants to do.” He was a cool customer. He didn’t get all excited-or he didn’t show it if he did. And the odds were that somebody was tapping his telephone, too. Sure, he went back forever with Jake Featherston. All the more reason for Featherston to make sure he didn’t get out of line, wasn’t it?
Pinkard got off the phone. When you were talking with the higher-ups, you didn’t want to waste their time. He’d done everything he reasonably could. Now he had to wait and see if the Attorney General could run with the ball.
And he had to make sure the camp went on running smoothly, regardless of where the Yankees were. Ever since he first started taking care of prisoners during the Mexican civil war in the 1920s, he’d been convinced the only way you could keep your finger on the pulse of what was going on was by seeing for yourself. A lot of ways, his office looked like any other Confederate bureaucrat’s. Most bureaucrats, though, didn’t have a submachine gun hanging on the wall by their desk. Pinkard grabbed the weapon, attached a big snail-drum magazine, and went out to take a look around.
A couple of junior guards fell in behind him when he did. That was all right; nobody armed had any business going into the camp alone except in an emergency. The puppies wouldn’t cramp Pinkard’s style. They wouldn’t know where he was going and what he was doing because he wouldn’t know himself till he started doing it. That often made his subordinates despair, but more than once it let him nip what could be trouble before it got too big to be easily nippable.
The guards at the barbed-wire-strung gates between the administrative compound and the camp proper saluted him. “Group Leader!” they chorused.
“At ease, at ease,” he said, returning the salute. Part of him liked being treated like the equivalent of a major general. Another part, the part that was a private during the Great War, thought it all a bunch of damn foolishness. Right now, that part had the upper hand.
After the guards let him and his watchdogs through the inner gate, they closed it behind him. Then they opened the outer gate. He and the younger men walked into the camp.
Even the stink seemed stronger on this side of the barbed wire. Maybe that was Jeff’s imagination. He couldn’t prove it wasn’t. But his nose wrinkled at the odors of unwashed skin and sewage. Skinny Negroes stared at him as if he’d fallen from another world. By the difference between his life and theirs, he might as well have.
The wreathed stars on either side of his collar drew the black men as honey drew flies. “You gots to let me out, suh!” one man said. “You gots to! I’s an innocent man!”
“Kin we have us mo’ food?” another Negro asked.
“My fambly!” said another. “Is my fambly all right?”
“Everybody’s in here for a reason.” Jeff spoke with complete certainty. He knew what the reason was, too. You’re a bunch of niggers. Oh, the Freedom Party still ran camps for white unreliables, too. The whole camp system cut its teeth on them. But not many white unreliables were left any more. The Party also had better ways to get rid of them these days. Slap a uniform on an unreliable, stick a rifle in his hands, put him in a punishment battalion, and throw him at the damnyankees. Most of those people loved the United States, anyway. Only fair they should die at U.S. hands. And if they took out a few soldiers in green-gray before they got theirs, so much the better.