“Yeah, but it tastes like you’re drinking burnt roots,” Moss said.
“That’s ’cause you are,” Cantarella said cheerfully. “If you don’t get your ass in gear, though, you won’t get to drink any burnt roots, on account of everybody else will have drunk ’em all up.” There was a threat to conjure with. Moss got to his feet. He creaked and crunched, but he made himself move.
After a tin cup full of essence of burnt roots-and maybe a little bit of the real bean-life looked better, or at least less blurry. Moss munched on a chunk of cornbread. Spartacus squatted beside him. “Nigger come out from Americus in the night,” the guerrilla leader remarked. “He say there’s a train comin’ we gots to blow. Gots to sabotage.” He spoke the last word with sardonic relish.
And Jonathan Moss liked the idea of striking a train better than he liked going into these half-assed Georgia towns and shooting them up. Shooting up a town annoyed the Confederates and made them flabble. Wrecking a train, though, meant the men and munitions aboard either wouldn’t get into the fight against the USA or would get there late. “Sounds good,” he said. “What’s on this one? Do you know?”
“Oh, I know, all right.” Spartacus sounded thoroughly grim. “Niggers is on it.”
“Huh?” Even after the mostly ersatz coffee, Moss wasn’t at his best.
“Niggers,” Spartacus repeated. “From No’th Carolina, I reckon. They’s headin’ for them camps. They git there, they don’t come out no mo’. So we gots to make sure they ain’t gonna git there.”
Rescuing a trainload of blacks wouldn’t do the USA much good, but Moss didn’t even dream of trying to talk the guerrilla chieftain out of it. Spartacus had his own worries, his own agenda. When those took him on a track that also helped the United States, he didn’t mind. When they didn’t, he didn’t care.
One of his men knew more about dynamiting train tracks than Nick Cantarella did, and Cantarella was no blushing innocent. The U.S. officer did suggest a diversionary raid a few miles away to give the explosives man-his name, also likely a nom de guerre, was Samson-a chance to work undisturbed. Spartacus liked that. “Sneaky fucker, you,” he said, nothing but admiration in his voice.
He sent off a few of his men to shoot at trucks on the highway. That would be plenty to draw the Confederates’ attention-and that of their Mexican stooges, too. The rest of the band lurked close by where Samson did his job.
The train pushed a heavily laden flat car ahead of the locomotive. That kept Samson’s bomb from wrecking the engine itself. Against some kinds of sabotage, it might have mattered. But the bomb still made the train stop. Then the guerrillas sprayed the engine and the men inside with gunfire. Steam plumed from the punctured boiler.
Some of Spartacus’ men ran forward to open the passenger cars and freight cars in the train. Others stayed back to cover them. Jonathan Moss was one of those who hung back-he doubted the Negroes in there would welcome any white face just then.
Blacks began spilling out, more and more and more of them. “Sweet Jesus!” Cantarella said. “How many smokes did those Freedom Party bastards cram in there?”
“Too many,” Moss said, and then, “Now I believe every atrocity story I ever heard. You don’t pack people in like that if you don’t mean to dispose of them.”
He watched in horrified fascination as the Negroes scattered over the countryside. They didn’t know where they were going, where they would sleep, or what-if anything-they would eat. But they were sure of one thing, and so was he: whatever happened to them here, they would be better off than if this train got to where it was going.
Most of the time, Irving Morrell didn’t like getting called back to Philadelphia for consultation. Some things, though, were too big to plan on the back on an envelope. What to do once the USA drove the CSA out of Ohio seemed to fall into that category.
Brigadier General John Abell met him at the Broad Street Station. The tall, thin, pale General Staff officer was as much a product of the War Department as Morrell was of the field. Morrell was sure Abell distrusted him as much as he distrusted the other man, and for reasons probably mirroring his own.
“Good to see you under these circumstances,” Abell said, shaking his hand.
“Good to be here under these circumstances,” Morrell answered. Better by far to come to Philadelphia to plan the next attack than to figure out how to defend the city. More than eighty years had passed since a Confederate army reached Philadelphia. Morrell devoutly hoped the city never saw another one.
As they walked from the station to the auto Abell had waiting, the General Staff officer said, “When we beat the Confederates this time, we’re going to beat them so flat, they’ll never give us trouble again. We’ll beat them so flat, they won’t even think about raising a hand against us from now on.”
“I like that,” Morrell said. The enlisted man driving the government-issue Chevrolet sprang out to open the back door for his exalted passengers. After Morrell slid into the green-gray auto, he went on, “Can we bring it off?”
“Militarily? I think we can. It won’t be easy or cheap, but we can do it.” Abell sounded coldly confident. “We can, and we need to, and so we will.” As if to underscore his determination, the Chevy rolled by a downed Confederate bomber. Behind a barricade of boards on sawhorses, technicians swarmed over the airplane, partly to see if the enemy had come up with anything new and partly to salvage whatever they could.
“Oh, yeah-I think we can whip ’em, too,” Morrell said. “But we have to occupy them once we do. Otherwise, they’ll just start rearming on the sly the way they did after the Great War.”
John Abell nodded. “You and I are on the same page, all right.” He let out a small chuckle; they’d known each other for close to thirty years, and that wasn’t the kind of thing either one of them said every day. Then he went on, “Plans for doing that are already being prepared.”
“Good. Are the planners working out how much it’ll cost us?” Morrell asked. Abell made a questioning noise. Morrell explained: “They hate us down there. They hate us bad. Maybe they hate their own Negroes worse, but maybe they don’t, too. And it’s awful easy to make a guerrilla war hurt occupiers these days. Auto bombs. People bombs. Land mines. Time bombs. These goddamn newfangled rockets. It was bad when we tried to hold down Houston and Kentucky. It’ll be worse now. ‘Freedom!’” He added the last word with sour emphasis.
General Abell looked pained-not so much for the wit, Morrell judged, as for what lay behind it. “Maybe it’s a good thing you’re here for more than one reason,” Abell said. “You ought to write an appreciation with all that in mind.”
“No one will appreciate it if I do,” Morrell said.
That made Abell look more pained still. But he said, “You might also be surprised. We’re looking at this. We’re looking at it very seriously, because we think we need to. If you point out some pitfalls, that will be to everyone’s advantage-except the Confederates’, of course.”
He was serious. The War Department was serious, then: whatever else you could say about John Abell, he made a good weather vane. “If we occupy the CSA, we won’t even pretend to be nice people any more,” Morrell warned. “It’ll be like Utah, only more so. We’ll have to kill anybody who gives us a hard time, and maybe kill the guy’s brother-in-law to make sure he doesn’t give us a hard time afterwards.”
“That is the working assumption, yes,” Abell agreed matter-offactly.
Morrell let out a soft whistle. “Lord!” he said. “If the Confederates are killing off their own Negroes the way we say they are-”
“They are.” Abell’s voice went hard and flat. “That’s not just propaganda, General. They really are doing it.”