“Uh-huh,” Nevers said. “Send her this hundred she wants. Write her a chatty letter about the kind of stuff you do. Tell her funny stories, nothing she can really use. With luck, we’ll drop on her before she can write back saying that isn’t what she wants.”
“Tunnel requisitions,” Dover murmured. Major Nevers looked blank. “I understand what you’re talking about, Major,” Dover told him. “I’ll do it. Maybe I’m seeing shadows where nothing’s casting them, but…”
“Yes. But,” Nevers said. “Go tend to it, Colonel. We’ll be in touch.”
“Right,” Dover said unhappily.
When he got back to the dump, he had to explain to Captain Chesbro that he didn’t know how the Confederate States were going to drive the Yankees back to the Ohio by Wednesday next. Writing a cheery, chatty letter to a woman he feared was a spy wasn’t easy, but he managed. He let Major Nevers vet it before he sent it out; he didn’t want the G-2 man thinking he was warning Melanie. He left it and the money and an envelope with the major to mail. Then he tried to worry about logistics.
He got a call from the major that night-in the middle of the night, in fact. A noncom woke him to go to the telephone. Without preamble, the Intelligence officer said, “She flew the coop, dammit.”
Dover said the first thing that came into his mind: “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“I know that,” the Intelligence officer answered. “We’ve had you under surveillance since you came to me earlier today.”
We? You and your pals? You and your tapeworm? You and God? Dover was silly with sleepiness. “How did she know to disappear, then?” he asked.
“Good question,” Major Nevers said. “I hope we find out-that’s all I’ve got to tell you. You’ve exposed a security leak, that’s for damn sure. I suppose I ought to thank you.” He didn’t sound grateful. Dover, yawning, didn’t suppose he could blame him.
Every time Major General Abner Dowling saw a pickup truck these days, he winced. The Confederates’ improvised gun platforms had caused him a hell of a lot of grief. Their flanking attacks had stalled his drive on Camp Determination and Snyder. They hadn’t made him fall back on Lubbock, let alone driven him over the border into New Mexico, the way the enemy probably hoped. But his men weren’t going forward any more, either.
And so he grimaced when a pickup truck approached Eleventh Army headquarters out there in the middle of nowhere, even though the truck was painted U.S. green-gray and he could see it had no machine gun mounted in the bed. No matter what color it was painted, guards made sure it wasn’t carrying a bomb before they let it come up to the tent outside of which Dowling stood.
He started to laugh when the truck door opened and a brisk woman not far from his own age got out. “What’s so damn funny, Buster?” Ophelia Clemens demanded, cigarette smoke streaming from her mouth as she spoke.
“The guards were looking for explosives, but they let you through anyhow,” Dowling answered. “You cause more trouble than any auto bomb or people bomb ever made.”
She batted her eyes at him, which set him laughing all over again. “You say the sweetest things, darling,” she told him. “Do you still keep a pint hidden in your desk?”
“It was only a half pint,” he said, “and now I’ll have to put a lock on that drawer.” That made her laugh. “Come on in,” he continued. “I’ll see what I can find. It’s good to see you, by God.”
“People I talk to aren’t supposed to tell me things like that,” the reporter said severely. “They’re supposed to say, ‘Jesus Christ! Here’s that Clemens bitch again!’” She was kidding, and then again she wasn’t.
“I never do things I’m supposed to. Would I be here if I did?” Dowling held the tent flap wide. “Won’t you walk into my parlor, said the fly to the spider?”
“That’s more like it.” Ophelia Clemens ducked inside. Dowling followed her. He did produce some whiskey, and even a couple of glasses. As he’d seen her do before, Miss Clemens-she’d never married-knocked hers back like a man. “And that’s more like it, too,” she said. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” Dowling said. “I don’t suppose you came way the hell out here just to drink my booze, so suppose you tell me why you did.”
“I want to do a piece on Camp Determination,” she answered. “I want to show people in the USA what that murderous son of a bitch in Richmond is doing to his Negroes.”
“That would be good,” Dowling said carefully, “but a lot of what we know is classified. I don’t know how much I’m authorized to show the press. Some of what we have shows how we got it, which isn’t so good.”
“This will have to pass the censors before it goes out,” she said. “As for authorization…” She fumbled in her purse, which held only a little less than a private’s pack. “Here.” She thrust a folded piece of paper at him.
He unfolded it. It was a letter from Assistant Secretary of War Franklin D. Roosevelt, allowing and indeed requiring him to tell Miss Clemens what he knew “since this information, when widely publicized, will prove valuable to the war effort.” He set it down. “Well, you’ve persuaded me,” he said. “I’m putty in your hands.”
“Promises, promises,” Ophelia Clemens said. They both grinned. The game of seduction played for farce, with neither of them intending to conquer, was almost as fun in its own way as it would have been for real. “What have you got?”
Dowling produced aerial photos. “Here’s the camp. The side north of the train tracks-that’s this way-holds women and children. The other side, which is older, is for men.”
“Uh-huh.” Like him, the reporter wore bifocals. “How big is this thing?”
“You see these little tiny rectangles here by the men’s side?” Dowling waited for her to nod, then went on, “Those are trucks. They’re about the size of our deuce-and-a-halfs.”
Ophelia Clemens blinked. “The place is that big?” Now Dowling nodded. She whistled. “It’s not a camp. It’s a goddamn city!”
“No, ma’am,” Dowling said. “There’s one big difference. A city has a permanent population. People go into Camp Determination, they go through it, but they don’t come out again-not alive, anyway.”
“And your evidence for that is…?”
He passed her more photos. “This is-was-a stretch of Texas prairie not far from the camp. Barbed wire keeps people out, not that anybody who doesn’t have to is likely to want to go out to the back of beyond. The bulldozers give you some idea of scale here. They also dig trenches. You can see that most of those are covered over. The couple that aren’t…Those are bodies inside.” He gave her another picture. “A low-level run by a fighter-bomber got us this one. You can really make out the corpses here.”
“Jesus!” She studied it. “How many bodies are in here? Have you got any idea?”
“Only a rough one,” Dowling answered. “Hundreds of thousands of people, that’s for sure. The experts who are supposed to be good at figuring this stuff out say it’s unlikely there are more than a million…so far, anyway.”
“Jesus!” Ophelia Clemens said again, more violently than before. “Give me that bottle again, will you? I need another drink. Hundreds of thousands, maybe a million-what did they do to deserve it?”
“They were born colored,” Dowling said. “To the Freedom Party, that’s a capital offense.”
“If that’s a joke, it’s not funny,” she said as he passed her the bottle. Her throat worked when she drank.
“I wasn’t kidding,” he told her. “The other thing you have to remember is, this isn’t the only camp the Confederates have. We think it’s the biggest, but we’ve also been able to disrupt operations here better than anywhere else. The ones farther east, in Louisiana and Mississippi, they go right on working all the time, because we can’t reach them.”