Armstrong stared at the Mormon. “You!” he said.
“You!” the Mormon-a major-echoed. They’d met before. Armstrong had made him strip to his drawers to prove he wasn’t a people bomb. The Mormons did their best to pay him back by turning him into a casualty. They didn’t quite manage, but not for lack of effort. The officer went on, “You’d better let me through this time.”
“Oh, yeah?” That automatically made Armstrong suspicious. “How come?”
“Because-” The Mormon choked on his answer and had to try again: “Because I’m coming to try to work out a surrender, that’s why.” He looked like a man who badly, desperately, wanted to scream, God damn it! He didn’t, though. In all too many ways, the Mormons were made of stern stuff.
“Oh, yeah?” In spite of himself, Armstrong didn’t sound so hostile this time. The Mormon major’s fury and frustration embittered his face as well as his voice.
“Yeah.” Again, the Mormon’s fastidiousness seemed to handicap him. “If we don’t, you people will murder all of us, the same as the Confederates are murdering their colored people.”
“Why should you piss and moan about Featherston’s fuckers?” Armstrong said. “You’re in bed with ’em, for Christ’s sake!”
He got a look full of hatred from the Mormon major. “‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend,’” the Mormon quoted. “You ever hear that one? You people send guns to the Negroes. The Confederates give us a hand when they can. It evens out.”
“Oh, boy. It evens out,” Armstrong said in a hollow voice. “How do we know you guys won’t keep using people bombs even after you say you’ve given up?”
“Because we’ll be hostages, that’s how.” The Mormon major looked and sounded like death warmed over. “How many of us will you murder every time anything like that happens? You’ll set the number high-and you know it.”
“Like you won’t deserve it,” Armstrong said.
“I don’t have to dicker with you, and I thank God for that,” the Mormon said. “Will you please pass me through to your officers? They’re the ones who can say whether they’ll let any of us live.”
Armstrong thought about making him strip again. He didn’t do it this time. He wanted nothing more than getting out of Utah in one piece. A truce or a surrender or whatever you called it made that more likely. He did say, “Come forward so I can pat you down. You still may be a people bomb.”
“Do whatever you think you need to,” the Mormon said. By itself, that went a long way toward convincing Armstrong he wasn’t loaded with explosives. The man came up to him, lowered the white flag, and raised his hands. Armstrong frisked him and found the nothing he expected.
“Yeah, you’re clean,” Armstrong said when he was satisfied. “Come on with me. I’ll take you back.”
“You’re not gloating as much as I thought you would,” the Mormon major remarked.
“Sorry,” Armstrong said. “I just want to get this over with so we can go on with the real war, you know what I mean?”
“Oh, sure,” the enemy officer said bitterly. “We’re just the sideshow, along with the trained ponies and the flea circus and the freaks.”
“You said it, pal-I didn’t,” Armstrong replied. The Mormon gave him another dirty look. He ignored it.
He passed the Mormon major on to behind-the-line troops, then went back to his platoon. “You think anything will come of it?” Yossel asked him.
“Beats me,” Armstrong said. “Even if it does, are we ever gonna let up on these snakes again? Every time we try it, they give us one right in the nuts.”
“Be nice to get the hell out of Utah,” Yossel said wistfully.
“Yeah, and if they let us leave, you know where they’ll ship our asses next?” Armstrong waited for Yossel to shake his head, then went on, “Up to fucking Canada, that’s where. We’re good at putting down rebellions, so they’ll give us another one.” Yossel, a look of horror on his face, flipped him the bird. Armstrong gave it right back. He knew how the War Department’s mind worked-if you called that working.
Flora Blackford and Robert Taft glared at each other in the small conference room. The Congresswoman from New York and the Senator from Ohio were friends on a personal level. Though she was a Socialist and he a conservative Democrat, their views on prosecuting the war hadn’t been very different. They hadn’t been, but they were now.
“We have Jake Featherston to deal with,” Flora said. “He’s more important. We can worry about the Mormons later.”
“We’ve got them on the ropes now. We ought to finish them off,” Taft said. “Then we won’t have to worry about them later.”
“How do you aim to finish them?” Flora inquired. “If you don’t make peace when they ask for it, don’t you have to kill them all?”
Taft gestured toward the front of Congressional Hall. Along with Confederate bombs from the air, it was also scarred by Mormon auto bombs and people bombs. “Aren’t they doing their best to kill us all, or as many of us as they can?” he said.
“But they can’t, and we can,” she said. “They’re only trouble to us. We can destroy them. Isn’t that reason enough not to?”
“How many bites do they get?” Robert Taft returned. “Whenever we get in trouble with the Confederate States, the Mormons try to take advantage of it. They did it in the Second Mexican War. They did it in the Great War. If they just stayed quiet in Utah this time around and enjoyed being citizens again, nobody would have bothered them at all.”
“‘Enjoyed being citizens again,’” Flora echoed. “Do you think they might resent us a little for occupying them for twenty years?”
“Maybe,” Taft answered calmly. “Do you think we might resent them a little bit for making us conquer the whole state of Utah house by house in the Great War? How many casualties did they cause? How many divisions did they tie down? And now they’re doing it again. Do you think they can just walk away and say, ‘All right, we’ve had enough,’ and get off easy? Your nephew’s there, isn’t he? What does he say about that?”
“Yossel says he’d sooner fight the Confederates. That’s the war that really counts,” Flora answered. He also said he worried about getting sent to Canada instead. She understood that. If a division showed it could put down one rebellion, wouldn’t the War Department figure it was good at the job and ship it off to help put down another one?
“Even if the Mormons do surrender, or claim they’re surrendering, how many troops will we have to leave behind in Utah to disarm them all and make sure they don’t start fighting again as soon as our backs are turned?” Robert Taft asked. “Just licking them isn’t the only problem. We have to remind them that they’re licked, and that they’ll catch it even worse if they give us any more trouble. Even now, they’re probably stashing guns and explosives as fast as they can.”
They probably were, too. She couldn’t tell him he was wrong. But she said, “If we say, ‘No, you can’t surrender,’ what will they do? Fight till they’re all dead. Send people bombs all over the country, and auto bombs, and poison gas if they can arrange that. They’ll play Samson in the temple, except they won’t be playing.”
Now Taft gave her an unhappy look, because that also seemed only too probable. “You’re saying we don’t win even if we win, and they don’t lose even if they lose.”
“Oh, they lose, all right,” Flora said. “But so do we.”
“Maybe we ought to kill them all in that case,” Taft said.
Now Flora violently shook her head. “No, Robert. I’m going to quote the New Testament at you, even if I am Jewish: ‘For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his soul?’ You’ve seen the photos of those Confederate camp guards grinning while they hold their rifles and stand there on trenches full of dead Negroes. Do you want pictures like that with our soldiers in them?”
She waited. If Taft said yes, their cautious friendship was just one more war casualty. But he shook his head, too. “No. Those photographs sicken me-almost as much for what massacres like that do to the guards as for what they do to the poor colored people. I don’t want to murder the Mormons like that. But if they die in battle I won’t shed many tears.”