“Tell me,” Moss urged.
“We got one great big thing going for us when we waltz up to that airplane.” Cantarella waited till Moss made a questioning noise. Then he said, “We’re white. They won’t be looking for ofays”-he grinned when he used the word-“to up and steal a flying machine, not in a month of Sundays they won’t.”
Moss didn’t need to think about that very long before he nodded. “Well, you’re right. Too bad we won’t be able to see the looks on their faces after we take off.”
It sounded so good, so easy, so inevitable, that they overlooked something: they weren’t anywhere near an airstrip. They didn’t come anywhere near one for quite a while, either. Their sole relationship with airplanes was hiding from them.
After a few days, Moss told Cantarella, “You ought to suggest to Spartacus that we go hit an airport so they can’t spy on us so well.”
“I ought to?” The Army officer pointed at him. “What about you?”
“No.” Moss shook his head. “If it comes from you, it’s strategy. He’s used to that. If it comes from me, it’s The pilot wants to get his hands on an airplane. And he’d be right, ’cause I do. Better the other way.”
Whiskers rasped under Cantarella’s fingers as he scratched his chin. “Yeah, that makes sense. I’ll do it,” he said at last. “Don’t know whether he’ll listen to me, but it’s a pretty good shot.”
“A lot depends on how well they guard their airstrips,” Moss said. “If they’re locked up tight, Spartacus won’t want anything to do with them, and how do you blame him? But if he knows one where the locals are asleep at the switch…”
If there was an airstrip like that, Spartacus would know about it. The grapevine worked. Not all Negroes had disappeared from Confederate society-just most of them. There were still cooks and maids and janitors. They heard things. They knew things. And what they heard, what they knew, they managed to pass to guerrilla leaders like Spartacus.
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?”